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A question regarding KSP and Unity5(b)


KerBlam

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UNITY 5 is available as a beta for those that have pre-ordered UNITY 5.

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Can anyone tell me:

Has SQUAD been developing and testing KSP in the UNITY 5 beta?

If they aren't, is it because they have not pre-ordered UNITY 5, and never intend to release KSP on the U5 Engine.

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There are definitely plans to update to Unity 5, though as always nothing is set in stone until it's actually released. At this point it's hard to give any firm opinion on Unity 5 because as you said, it's still in beta. Also, please don't think that because the next version will be 1.0 that means we'll stop working on the game, read the announcement a little more carefully. Version 1.0 means that we've achieved what HarvesteR et al set out to create four years ago, with a few new things and a few things that ultimately didn't make it. We're ready to show the world what KSP is without its Early Access label. It does not mean we'll stop developing KSP and we're planning free updates for all players in the future, amongst which is of course the multiplayer feature.

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One, 64 bits.

Two, improved physics, shaders, lighting.

Three, there's more I won't list here but generally it's an improvement.

However, Unity 5 is still in beta and unstable, each beta version breaks something, so I wouldn't recommend using it for actual production.

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So my question with Unity 5 is... is it also 32 bit, or is it 64 bit only?

I don't have a 64 bit processor, so that would utterly cut me off from playing the game if it wasn't optional. (And you can keep your 'just upgrade!' shouts, folks. That costs funds I don't have currently.)

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There are definitely plans to update to Unity 5, though as always nothing is set in stone until it's actually released. At this point it's hard to give any firm opinion on Unity 5 because as you said, it's still in beta. Also, please don't think that because the next version will be 1.0 that means we'll stop working on the game, read the announcement a little more carefully. Version 1.0 means that we've achieved what HarvesteR et al set out to create four years ago, with a few new things and a few things that ultimately didn't make it. We're ready to show the world what KSP is without its Early Access label. It does not mean we'll stop developing KSP and we're planning free updates for all players in the future, amongst which is of course the multiplayer feature.

Alot of things have been said in the past that later changed or was dropped entirely. Was also said that when it went beta that it would stay like that for a good while, but now you are apparently suddenly jumping to a full release after a very short beta run.

Also to me it does not make sense to make it 1.0 before you have sorted out things like unity5 as that will for sure create some unforseen issues like bugs or save compatibility issues. And when in alpha or even beta it is kind of expected that for example save files break now and then but once in full release people will not expect their save files to get corrupted and there is probably a good chance of that happening with some of the features that will later be added or the unity5 port.

And reviews would also be another reason why the game should be more or less finished once beta ends since you wont get a second chance when it comes to reviews even if game later improves alot.

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So my question with Unity 5 is... is it also 32 bit, or is it 64 bit only?

I don't have a 64 bit processor, so that would utterly cut me off from playing the game if it wasn't optional. (And you can keep your 'just upgrade!' shouts, folks. That costs funds I don't have currently.)

Unity 5 can export to 32-bit or 64-bit platforms.

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So my question with Unity 5 is... is it also 32 bit, or is it 64 bit only?

I don't have a 64 bit processor, so that would utterly cut me off from playing the game if it wasn't optional. (And you can keep your 'just upgrade!' shouts, folks. That costs funds I don't have currently.)

What are you playing on? I thought I was bad with my old Core2Duo, but even that was 64-bit. Or are you in the 64-bit processor/32-bit OS bind?

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I think it's important to make it clear that Unity 5 is very unlikely to be the magical silver bullet people are making it out to be.

When we moved from unity 3 to 4, we had to deal with a LOT (and I do mean a LOT) of upgrade-related bugs which we didn't expect. Furthermore, the earlier versions of Unity 4 had quite a few bugs of their own which we had to work around (or hang tight) until fixes came along.

My point is, moving to Unity 5 is very unlikely to be a straightforward transition, and by no means I expect KSP to be stable or even playable (let alone improved) after simply upgrading the project over. I would be very happy to be wrong in that one, I must add, but historically, every time we upgraded to a new major version of unity, we came across new issues we had to contend with, so please don't get overexcited about Unity 5 just yet.

This late in a project, most games tend to freeze engine versions when they find something stable that fits their needs. Regression issues is in fact the main reason why Unity stuck with PhysX 2.8 until now. If breaking mods and saves is an issue for us, imagine their case, where instead of mods and saves, they risk breaking hundreds of commercial projects. We have it easy by comparison really...

Anyhow, we don't plan to freeze engines, but I just wanted to clarify that moving to Unity 5 may not be as simple and so immediately beneficial as it may seem. At the very least, we don't plan to upgrade until A: The 1.0 release is out, and B: Until U5 is out of beta and confirmed stable.

Cheers

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I certainly feel like/fear the changes in PhysX brought on by Unity 5 will require a lot of reworking of many parts of the game, and will probably break many saves/crafts. To do that on the release version sounds a bit... tricky.

I'm not really sure where the whole narrative of "U5 will fix All The Bugs!" came from, anyway... surely I'm not the only one who remembers engine upgrades bringing tons of little bugs that persisted a few versions before it got properly stable?

Edited by NovaSilisko
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So my question with Unity 5 is... is it also 32 bit, or is it 64 bit only?

I don't have a 64 bit processor, so that would utterly cut me off from playing the game if it wasn't optional. (And you can keep your 'just upgrade!' shouts, folks. That costs funds I don't have currently.)

How can you not have a 64-bit processor? Any processor capable of playing KSP is 64-bit, all CPU's have been 64-bit since just after the turn of the century. Operating Systems are another story, but don't worry the 32-bit version isn't going anywhere so if you have a 32 bit OS you will be fine.

I think it's important to make it clear that Unity 5 is very unlikely to be the magical silver bullet people are making it out to be.

When we moved from unity 3 to 4, we had to deal with a LOT (and I do mean a LOT) of upgrade-related bugs which we didn't expect. Furthermore, the earlier versions of Unity 4 had quite a few bugs of their own which we had to work around (or hang tight) until fixes came along.

My point is, moving to Unity 5 is very unlikely to be a straightforward transition, and by no means I expect KSP to be stable or even playable (let alone improved) after simply upgrading the project over. I would be very happy to be wrong in that one, I must add, but historically, every time we upgraded to a new major version of unity, we came across new issues we had to contend with, so please don't get overexcited about Unity 5 just yet.

This late in a project, most games tend to freeze engine versions when they find something stable that fits their needs. Regression issues is in fact the main reason why Unity stuck with PhysX 2.8 until now. If breaking mods and saves is an issue for us, imagine their case, where instead of mods and saves, they risk breaking hundreds of commercial projects. We have it easy by comparison really...

Anyhow, we don't plan to freeze engines, but I just wanted to clarify that moving to Unity 5 may not be as simple and so immediately beneficial as it may seem. At the very least, we don't plan to upgrade until A: The 1.0 release is out, and B: Until U5 is out of beta and confirmed stable.

Cheers

But just out of curiosity, have you done any internal testing with the beta yet?

Edited by Alshain
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What is it that has everyone hyped for unity 5? Can anyone explain for someone who doesn't follow these things.

From what ive heard, unity 5 is at least in theory suppose to be the one true fix to part count lag.

Part count lag is (at leats for me) the biggest turnoff in the entire game. I still really like this game, but it sucks being limited to either using buggy mods (welding, procedurals, both of which arent supported in any DMP server ive seen), or havuing to cut down on looks (a capital ship made of emty massive fuel tanks may be huge, but it sure isnt as pretty as structural panels).

There is also going to be official x64 support in unity 5, so hopefully ill be able to run things like high resolution texture packs and not run out of memory. Although this option is honestly more of an issue for those who like to have many many mods installed.

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From what ive heard, unity 5 is at least in theory suppose to be the one true fix to part count lag.

Part count lag is (at leats for me) the biggest turnoff in the entire game. I still really like this game, but it sucks being limited to either using buggy mods (welding, procedurals, both of which arent supported in any DMP server ive seen), or havuing to cut down on looks (a capital ship made of emty massive fuel tanks may be huge, but it sure isnt as pretty as structural panels).

There is also going to be official x64 support in unity 5, so hopefully ill be able to run things like high resolution texture packs and not run out of memory. Although this option is honestly more of an issue for those who like to have many many mods installed.

Well kinda, Unity 5 does get PhysX 3.3 and other stuff (multi-threaded job handler etc) which will help, but it might not be the universal all awesome all the time no-limit fix being hoped for

Under Unity 4 / PhysX 2.8.4 all physics processing is happening on a single thread which can fill up a single processor core very quickly, with Unity 5 / PhysX 3.3 discrete 'body collections' can have their own threads, which, while way better (because your space station and hugezilla ship would be independent processes happening in different threads/cpus without chunking your FPS when they're near each other), but for monolithic objects (say a single framecrawler class vessel) their processing is still constrained to a single thread, so the improvement would be limited to that between 2.8.4 and 3.3, which is honestly still pretty big in its own right.

There was a Unity Technologies post explaining what it would offer (which I could be misremembering), I should have saved the link for it

Edited by NoMrBond
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PhysX performance is much improved in Unity 5 apparently. I'm not actually sure that that PhysX is the limiting factor in the game physics -- lots of people assume it is, but we don't have timings from Squad confirming that it is. I suspect the scripting is about as much time as the PhysX internals.

Unity 5 isn't going to improve script performance as far as I can tell. That's for later.

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If breaking mods and saves is an issue for us

Just out of curiosity - why breaking an old save is an issue? Some games' updates break old saves well after 1.0 mark. Same goes with mods - no one can tell will it work on a new version or not.

Backward compatibility should be a "if possible" bonus, not the main focus. Just write "You need to start a new game in order to use all new features" in patch notes. Nobody will blame you for this.

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PhysX performance is much improved in Unity 5 apparently. I'm not actually sure that that PhysX is the limiting factor in the game physics -- lots of people assume it is, but we don't have timings from Squad confirming that it is. I suspect the scripting is about as much time as the PhysX internals.

Unity 5 isn't going to improve script performance as far as I can tell. That's for later.

I remember the cheering when they made the MONO/.NET update announcement at Unite 2014, and not understanding at the time why they were all so excited

Pity that won't be part of the Unity 5.0 release though

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I think it's important to make it clear that Unity 5 is very unlikely to be the magical silver bullet people are making it out to be.

When we moved from unity 3 to 4, we had to deal with a LOT (and I do mean a LOT) of upgrade-related bugs which we didn't expect. Furthermore, the earlier versions of Unity 4 had quite a few bugs of their own which we had to work around (or hang tight) until fixes came along.

My point is, moving to Unity 5 is very unlikely to be a straightforward transition, and by no means I expect KSP to be stable or even playable (let alone improved) after simply upgrading the project over. I would be very happy to be wrong in that one, I must add, but historically, every time we upgraded to a new major version of unity, we came across new issues we had to contend with, so please don't get overexcited about Unity 5 just yet.

This late in a project, most games tend to freeze engine versions when they find something stable that fits their needs. Regression issues is in fact the main reason why Unity stuck with PhysX 2.8 until now. If breaking mods and saves is an issue for us, imagine their case, where instead of mods and saves, they risk breaking hundreds of commercial projects. We have it easy by comparison really...

Anyhow, we don't plan to freeze engines, but I just wanted to clarify that moving to Unity 5 may not be as simple and so immediately beneficial as it may seem. At the very least, we don't plan to upgrade until A: The 1.0 release is out, and B: Until U5 is out of beta and confirmed stable.

Cheers

Thanks.. I hope the transition isn't too difficult for you guys when it comes about.

I have read and I understand that you guys are absolutely determined to release 1.0. and implement further improvements after release. That's cool, I get it for whatever reason, it's your project and you can do what you like.

The reason I asked the question 'Is any testing being done using the UNITY 5 beta?' is because, even though it is a beta release you would get a feel for how much of a task the transition would be when it happens. To me that sort of thing seems ideal while KSP is still in Beta itself.

I'd assumed that you would have access to the beta version, because everybody who pre-ordered UNITY 5 has access to the beta for free.

While I'm not expecting magical silver bullets, what I do expect is that one day I will be able to run KSP using all of my cores, and all of my RAM natively without having to write shell scripts to force specific OpenGL libraries and Multi-threading.

I enjoy this game. I've been a gamer my whole life, and KSP has effectively replaced every other game. I don't play anything else now. I really want it to be as good as it can possibly be, and I'd like to get the maximum performance out of my hardware, which I know I'm not at the moment.

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What are you playing on? I thought I was bad with my old Core2Duo, but even that was 64-bit. Or are you in the 64-bit processor/32-bit OS bind?

An intel Pentium 4 CPU. I attempted to install 64 bit Win7 on it. No go, says I'm 32 bit processor.. so I suppose I'm in the 32 bit processor with 32 bit OS bind. :D

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I think if U5 can release a stable 64x engine it will be a huge boost for KSP. It will not be a magic bullet but it will at least allow the game to meet a lot of PC gamers expectations for a 2015 game to support 64x.

I am guessing the U5 devs have run into some unexpected problems since their past behavior was having the release version ready 4-6 months after EA/Beta.

I agree with HarvesteR that it will not be a silver bullet and will require some time to switch to a newer version. It will be well worth the effort considering the limitations on memory and the lag caused by reasonable part counts for exploring beyond the Mun and Minmus, Space stations etc.

I also think the current engine is holding Squad back from adding more parts, planetary features, more planets or asteroid belt, etc.

So it may not be a silver bullet but it certainly will allow more to put into the game, allow higher part counts while not lagging to the point the game is frustrating to play.

Somewhat off topic but I also feel KSP has a lot of room for improvement in regards to optimising the game for the curret engine.

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Would they be better off starting over? (Not this KSP, that would be folly) but finish this one then move to a bigger, better engine and crank out a completely new 2.0 version?

Hard to say. I don't think they would do that TBH. In all reality if they were to make KSP 2.0 it would have to be a vastly different game.

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