A question regarding KSP and Unity5(b)

[numerobis]

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?

Which bigger, better engine would that be? Every engine has its strengths and weaknesses. Unity's strength is in making development fast, rather than keeping a razor-sharp focus on in-game performance. Using a game engine like unreal or cryengine generally gets you better performance in-game, but the development costs are generally higher (and they tend to be more expensive to license).

There's stiff competition in the game engine world. Unity is nipping at the heels of the AAA game engines by upping the visuals and performance, whereas the AAA game engines are putting more effort into ease of development.

[Alshain]

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.

Yeah, P4 was indeed the last generation that had 32bit CPU's, but I'm amazed you can get it run. There is no guarantee Unity 5 will work with that even in 32 bit to be honest. It might, it might now.

Which bigger, better engine would that be? Every engine has its strengths and weaknesses. Unity's strength is in making development fast, rather than keeping a razor-sharp focus on in-game performance. Using a game engine like unreal or cryengine generally gets you better performance in-game, but the development costs are generally higher (and they tend to be more expensive to license).

There's stiff competition in the game engine world. Unity is nipping at the heels of the AAA game engines by upping the visuals and performance, whereas the AAA game engines are putting more effort into ease of development.

Unreal Engine is really expensive. It's not even a dollar amount, they take a percentage of your business. So 5% of Squad's gross profit would go to Epic. I don't see that ever happening.

Edited January 29, 2015 by Alshain

[KerBlam]

I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that Woody01 was referring to starting KSP over for Unity 5.

[WOODY01]

I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that Woody01 was referring to starting KSP over for Unity 5.

Not starting over but porting. I am not expecting Squad to do this but it would be nice. I am not sure what the finicial burden would be or the sales numbers KSP justifies the effort. I do highly believe KSP has a lot of room for improvement in optimisition. The memory foot print can be reduced( the existance of Active texture management proves this), CPU usage and general performance improvements.

[KerBlam]

That's what this thread is about.

KSP is built on Unity 4, which is a great platform but it is outdated. Unity 5 is in Beta.

Benefits of Unity 5 are:

• Unity is now 64-bit
  
• New multithreaded job scheduler
  
• NVIDIA PhysX 3.3
  
• Easier and incremental building of Asset Bundles
  
• New 2D physics effectors
  
• SpeedTree Integration
  
• NavMesh improvements
  
• Mecanim StateMachine Behaviours
  
• Loading optimizations
  
• And many other improvements
  

Also, I've see evidence of other development teams using and testing the U5 beta engine with their games, quite simply. I would really love to know if the KSP devs are doing the same, and if not, why not.

link to Verdun Devs live testing U5

[FenrirWolf]

You've asked the question enough that it's clear what you mean. Doesn't necessarily mean it will be answered.

[KerBlam]

Thanks, but as the question has not been directly answered, I'll keep asking

Also so we're clear your comment added to the discussion... nothing of any value at all.

[Xaiier]

Unity is now 64-bit

The EDITOR is 64 bit. Helpful, yes, but not for us. Unless it comes with a host of 64 bit fixes as well.

New multithreaded job scheduler

Meh

NVIDIA PhysX 3.3

This is where we can see some performance gains possibly, though I wouldn't get your hopes up for much more than 10% at most.

Easier and incremental building of Asset Bundles

Meh

New 2D physics effectors

Meh

SpeedTree Integration

Meh

NavMesh improvements

Meh

Mecanim StateMachine Behaviours

Meh

Loading optimizations

AFAIK this is not applicable to KSP's initial loading sequence

Also, I've see evidence of other development teams using and testing the U5 beta engine with their games, quite simply. I would really love to know if the KSP devs are doing the same, and if not, why not.

Perhaps you missed Harv's post, but I think that while he didn't answer you directly, the answer is obviously no. They have far too much to be doing already to be pre-testing a new beta engine and dealing with those bugs, especially considering the minimal benefits it will provide.

[KerBlam]

No, I saw Harvesters reply, and yep, I took it as a no. What 'no' means in the context of my question though is that KSP will never see U5. I'm not really into responses that are open to interpretation.

I don't see how the benefits could be 'minimal' when games like Verdun are trialling it and seeing huge performance boosts.

Native Multi-processor and multi-threading support are what KSP needs, as much as the 64b RAM limit.

In any case, if I have to be happy with a non-answer, then I will begrudgingly do so. This thread can be for intelligent debate about the topic if needed.

[NoMrBond]

The developers cannot give you a more positive 'yes' answer without committing, nay, trapping themselves beyond reasonable exit if things don't work out

If Squad say definitely unequivocally yes, and then some unforeseen snag makes it infeasible to port up KSP to Unity 5 people will flip their collective excreta in a conflagration of utterly epic proportions

They have to caveat it, just in case

They want to do it, it is likely they will be able to, but given prior 'but you promised us!' reactions, some of which are still dragging on, I don't think Squad wants to give their CM's another Sisyphean feature bolder to push up the community hill, they're quite probably sick to death of it.

[Rarity]

Can anyone tell me:

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

Probably not. While gained from interpretation, it's preeeeettty clear that if ANY testing has been done, it was very minimal amounts. See:

My point is, moving to Unity 5 is very unlikely to be a straightforward transition,

Can anyone tell me:

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

They *are* planning on upgrading. They are *not* planning on upgrading until 1.0 of both KSP and Unity 5 are out and things have settled. See:

Anyhow, we don't plan to freeze engines, 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.

There is very little to be interpreted there, HarvesteR already told us in this thread that KSP is not currently planned to be left on Unity 4. That does not mean plans will not change. But it does mean that your question has indeed been answered.

[Temeter]

On 27.1.2015 at 8:46 PM, HarvesteR said:

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

Good ol' Harvester being conservative. :3

Btw: This is not necro, but retrospection. Please take the guns down, mods.

Edited March 26, 2016 by Temeter

[Renegrade]

37 minutes ago, Temeter said:

Good ol' Harvester being conservative. :3

Btw: This is not necro, but retrospection. Please take the guns down, mods.

Actually, that remains to be seen.  Nothing I saw in the first 1.1 video suggested massive improvement, and a lot of the KSP issues are intrinsic to the KSP side of the code anyways.

Also any post older than 15 milliseconds (90% of one 60hz frame) is a necro in these forums~  ARM THE BANHAMMER!  NOW FOR WRATH!  NOW FOR RUIN!!  AND THE RED DAWN!!!! (just kiddin'~)

Edited March 26, 2016 by Renegrade

[Temeter]

59 minutes ago, Renegrade said:

Nothing I saw in the first 1.1 video suggested massive improvement, and a lot of the KSP issues are intrinsic to the KSP side of the code anyways.

Did you try same size crafts to compare?

E.g. on stream was just a 250+ parts craft that ran full real time. Pretty much impossible now.

Edited March 26, 2016 by Temeter

[Renegrade]

1 hour ago, Temeter said:

Did you try same size crafts to compare?

E.g. on stream was just a 250+ parts craft that ran full real time. Pretty much impossible now.

The stream I saw was flickering yellow for like forty part ships - my atom-powered netbook, which doesn't have enough CPU power to run notepad.exe, could handle a forty part ship in the yellow-red.  My main desktop can handle a 125 part ship while being in the green all the time.   Some of that is undoubtedly overhead from the screencapture and encoding software necessary for twitch (OBS or whatever is being used) but that's still not a strong indication of massive improvement.

Thus so far, I don't see any reason to say that Harv was wrong to be conservative (which is odd, especially after his EVA debacle).  We won't know for sure until we have it in our grubby little hands, but until then, Harv's position seems wise and sound to me.

[Temeter]

 

39 minutes ago, Renegrade said:

The stream I saw was flickering yellow for like forty part ships - my atom-powered netbook, which doesn't have enough CPU power to run notepad.exe, could handle a forty part ship in the yellow-red.  My main desktop can handle a 125 part ship while being in the green all the time.   Some of that is undoubtedly overhead from the screencapture and encoding software necessary for twitch (OBS or whatever is being used) but that's still not a strong indication of massive improvement.

Thus so far, I don't see any reason to say that Harv was wrong to be conservative (which is odd, especially after his EVA debacle).  We won't know for sure until we have it in our grubby little hands, but until then, Harv's position seems wise and sound to me.

We've seen a 480 part ship (+150 part launch tower) flying into space with acceptable physics speed and ok framerate.

Do you know what KSP 105 will do to you if you load a 480 part ship? :<

It's not just low part count performance, but that it seems to scale much better than before.

Edited March 26, 2016 by Temeter

[basic.syntax]

A "necro" could have been avoided, by making the retrospective comment in the newer thread