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Is ksp graphically outdated or on par.


ouion

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I think KSP graphics are right on for the style that they want to convey. As you get closer to realistic graphics, you expect the gameplay to be more realistic like BF4 or COD. KSP is right in the sweet spot of looking good, but a little cartoony and colorful since that is the world Kerbals live in. As others have said, perhaps a little more polishing could be done, but I think the first time I got into space and saw the sunrise over Kerbin was just as breathtaking as the best scenes in more realistic looking games.

That and there is something to be said for lower system requirements. I seem to be playing on my laptop a lot more, which is just using the integrated Intel Graphics 4000 on my i7-3540M CPU! Good luck with that on other games...

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The current high-end consoles lack the oomph to run KSP. Heck my i7 laptop lacks the oomph to even run 0.25, let alone 0.90.

Wut :huh:

I'm running it on an Athlon X2 dual core I bought back in 2009...I'm going to have to call shenanigans on that.

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Do think that KSP is fine for what is is graphics wise. As someone mentioned on one of the first few pages. 8 bit, 2D games extremly low to ascii art style games are making a come back. Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are two good examples of games people play that have what some might say bad graphics. But, they both make up for it in gameplay. Even though you do have to tend to be into S&M for DF. Failure is fun. =^.^=

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The graphics are... decent... my main complaints are:

-No clouds

-No reflective surfaces

-Ugly water

-low res textures in some areas and on some parts(This is probably because of the 3.5Gb RAM limit, and can't be helped)

-Some Ambient occlusion and lense flares would be nice.

-Some of the GUI looks dated

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A crysis-like KSP? Sure they can do that without problem. But that Krysis thing will make your computer explode with a 20 parts rocket at launch. Even if your computer is a super badass you lag like s&it on orbit because Unity‘s performance is s#it at extreme graphic

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I'm running it on an Athlon X2 dual core I bought back in 2009...I'm going to have to call shenanigans on that.

I'd fraps it for you, but that would probably put it down to 4fps. It was reliably stuttering below 15 even in the VAB. Part of this is how badly Win7 handles power management features (XP was actually better at that, partly because it was too 'dumb' to enable a number of those features). The rest of it is that post Sandybridge-E chips were designed at large-scale blackout-level drinking parties, and that a 2.3ghz IvyBridge running in a laptop configuration just isn't a decent number cruncher. (The Sandybridge-E was designed at a party in Scrooge McDuck's vault on the other hand, and has trouble being affordable).

To be fair, some of those powersave features are probably triggered by and handled directly in hardware, outside of Win7's control, but that still doesn't excuse it's utter lack of the performance governor.

The "modern" consoles use AMD Jaguars running around 1.6ghz, and will be facing an even steeper challenge. KSP is rather single threaded (and many of the problems both in KSP and other software do NOT give themselves readily to multithreading, regardless of what drunken Intel execs might try to say), and any surplus cores any machine have go largely unused (as I said, not entirely Squad or even Unity's fault).

(To anybody who doesn't understand the limitations of multithreading/SMP, please refer to Thread Synchronization and Amdahl's law. And read every link that those articles link to. And every article past those. And then realize that if you skipped ahead to the following phrase -- :trollface: -- you could have saved several hours: it just doesn't work on all problems.)

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KSP is dated in my opinion. With other space games like No Man's Sky (also made by a small team) rendering beautiful planets and solar systems on a galactic scale, KSP looks clunky and old. I understand that the physics and everything are way more accurate in KSP, but I hope they use a different engine for any Kerbal sequel a few years from now.

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KSP is severely lacking in graphical fidelity when it comes to space, atmosphere and... well, everything.

Given the the game's intrinsic limits due to poor programing, engine choice or whatever the case may be, this won't likely change.

KSP in general eats up an unreasonable amount of power for not all that much in return, hopefully something that can be at least slightly improved with time, once "polishing" starts.

From what i understand, it has a few quite severe memory leaks, and doesn't make full use of a system's power to begin with, along with inefficient file formats and other various factors.

If it were built around 64 bit, this wouldn't be such a problem (although still poor form), but that's unfortunately almost impossible it seems, because unity. Or something.

Now i'm not one to complain about graphics, regularly playing quite a few older games myself, but it would be nice to see a few visual enhancements added to a game about space, which is known for being incredibly beautiful.

I enjoy my immersion, after all.

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I'd also note that I'm normally about the last person to complain about graphics. The issue I have with KSP's graphics (specifically, terrain) is that it's so bland at the scales I play at as to totally break immersion.

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I think the graphics are fine. What sold me was how it plays and thinking it made me to. I like to exercise my brain, not my fingers by playing (YARBS) Yet Another Realistic Button-Smasher. After seeing enough pictures of ksp on imgur and reading a little, I had to play this. I didnt even own the demo long until I bought the full version.

For me, gameplay sells. Heck, I like playing what is probably the worst pc game ever made "Big Rigs", just because its that kind of disaster...

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I strongly disagree with those that say the graphic does not matter. It is not the most important part of the game, but it matters. Personally, some of the best parts of the game are when I get to orbit and then take a minute to enjoy the view. THAT is really important moment in the game for me.

As for graphic in game, my biggest gripe is that a lot of things look mismatched. It is clear it has been made by many people over significant period of time. Streamlining the design and aesthetics is one of the things I would consider to be necessary for KSP to feel finished (or call it 1.0 if you like). Clouds go into nice-to-have category, not mandatory.

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It doesn't look as shiny as some games do, but I don't think that's the point of the game or games in general. Project Zomboid is one of the most immersive games I've played recently, scary as hell, but it has graphics that are hardly better than most of the early 90's stuff. If the gameplay is good, the graphics don't matter that much.

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My only problem with KSP's fidelity is the very low LOD settings.

to be honest i haven't checked the graphic settings in a long time, so maybe there's already something

or we can fiddle around in the ini files.

But beside that i think it's fine.

I don't want junk like DoF, Lens Flares, color tint or other "cinematic effects".

Wherre possible i disable it anyways.

(That said - it of course wouldn't hurt if there's an option to enable those things)

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KSP is a game about exploration: Going to places and seeing what they look like. The gameplay is all found in designing and travelling to these places, with little to do when you get there. As such, graphics are an important element. Not just in terms of shaders and texture depth, but the art style itself. Terrain and oceans are a let down on this front. We have entire planets with little variation. Once you've seen the texture and terrain scatter of a few biomes, that's it. You've seen all there is to see with that planet. The textures themselves are quite bland. More variety all round is what's needed. Giant crystals anyone? Lava lakes? Dust storms? These all have the benefit of allowing for varied gameplay as well as aesthetics.

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From the perspective of a potential buyer, graphics are one of the few visible indications of the quality of work put into a game. Gameplay is difficult to get across in videos, and reviews can be untrustworthy. When I first discovered KSP, I was apprehensive about purchasing it as the graphical style said that it was "My First Unity Game". I imagine that I'm not the only one who had this thought at the time, and it's nice to see how far things have come (but look at that shiny water!):

Kerbal-Space-Program_1.jpg

I've been playing this game for donkeys but my little bro walked in on me a couple week ago and told me ksp looks like PS2 graphics.

He's right. Here's a game from the PS2 era, released nearly 10 years ago. Note the atmospheric lighting and scattering, particle effects, clouds, reflections, and low-resolution though interesting textures:

ace_combat_zero_the_belkan_war-132153.jpg

ace_combat_zero_the_belkan_war-101685.jpg

Speaking of clouds: Flight Simulator 2004:

microsoft-flight-simulator-2004-screenshot2.jpg

They even released a paper on how to make these clouds.

Above everything else, the two effects I'd like to see that I think would have the biggest effect on the game's appearance are reflections and new atmospheric shaders. Atmospheric shaders are particularly important in a space game, as they give us a sense of scale, and a feeling of how different atmospheric and vacuum bodies are.

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With bonus terrain texture variety!

Edited by pizzaoverhead
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Wut :huh:

I'm running it on an Athlon X2 dual core I bought back in 2009...I'm going to have to call shenanigans on that.

I'm also running an Athlon X2 with no issues (save the RAM overload) BUT... I recently swapped out my old ATi 3450 for an R9 270, before I did that I was getting huge FPS drops just on the space Centre screen with low settings.

Contrary to popular belief, GPU power does indeed affect KSP performance quite a bit. To test this I downclocked my CPU to 1ghz and while the physics processes were slower on large part counts, the frame rate didn't change from when it was running at the full 2.3ghz.

I then switched back to my 3450 with the CPU at 2.3ghz and the game was unplayable.

- - - Updated - - -

I bought KSP after playing the demo... That was based on 0.13, THOSE were outdated graphics.

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Graphics don't make a game great, while it's not photo-realistic it has its own style and still looks good.

Games these days don't have to be using the top-of-the-range graphics either, we're seeing a resurgence in 2D games, pixel art, sprites, voxels, low polygon count 3D.

Few of these new "old style" games are particularly "old" looking though, their graphics and style suit their themes.

The days of all games having to look as real as possible seem to (thankfully) be behind us :)

Fully agree! In fact, personally I prefer a slightly more cartoony or abstract art style as long as it's consistent.

The more realistic a game looks the more it suffers from the "Uncanny Valley". For example I have no issues believing a purple ocean in a cartoon-ish world, but in a realistic world I'd be questioning why it's purple. Or I have no issues with the way cartoon-ish characters behave (movement style, speech, etc) whereas in a realistic game I'd be annoyed and jarred out of my sense of disbelief if the animation was less than "human" or the lipsync not quite matched up.

On the whole I think KSP looks just great the way it is; I've certainly enjoyed some fantastic sunrises and various glamour shots, and I would MUCH prefer the developers to concentrate on adding/extending features / bug fixing / optimising, than making sure the grain of wood on the window sill of the VAB is perfect or that the

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KSP's graphics probably lack some of those modern graphical bells and whistles, but I don't think it's about squishing as much glitter into the game as possible to make it nearly unplayable. Sure, Space Engineers provide players with top-notch graphics, but once I build a 300 block long ship I'm dropping into low 20's FPS. Sure, this is better than it was before when the game was actually unplayable on easy start 2 with my computer, which goes as follows from the Ubuntu details tab:

ang1etN.png

Even now, I can't go big with space engineers. All because my mid-range system (actually, to think about it, it's the upper mid-range of consumer computers) can't handle it. I'm not buying a new one for space engineers when this one can handle 90% of what I want from it. Good job, Lenovo.

Also, KSP as a whole looks really really good compared even to some AAA titles (Civilization, anyone?). I'd say it's like Dishonored. Dishonored hasn't got that good graphics if you take each element alone:

dishonored-textures.jpg

This is just a close-up on a texture. It's pretty ugly, isn't it?

Now take the game as a whole:

522665453.jpg

Dishonored-Safe-Combinations.jpg

What I'm trying to say is that if you use low-tech solutions properly, it often ends up much better than if you use hi-tech improperly. So no, KSP is not an eyesore. In fact, it's well done, from the graphical point of view. More glitter would just bloat our systems.

Edited by InterCity
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Now now, Don't get too carried away with this because of graphics.

I mean, people with slow computers have enough to deal with KSP lagging for them. Buffed up graphics in a generated world this big wouldn't really help.

As some guy who's name I don't know once said:

"Graphics don't matter. So shut up PS4 and Xbox"

Or... Something like that. Yeah.

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I COULD NOT CARE LESS!

I wouldn't care that much if every part was pixellated and grey. graphics don't appeal to me. GAMEPLAY, and the ability to realistically simulate a whole solar system, with vehicular customization tools unlike any other game in existence, that's what appeals to me.

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Nah, the graphics are fine, the lack of polish is not. Clouds, weather (storms, fog, dust storms, etc.), planetshine, better skybox, lens flares, auroras. All of these things are provided by mods but should be stock. A little polish can go a long way.

I agree, its the polish that makes a game really pop and stand out. And as KSP gets nearer to the end of its Beta phase, that is the time where things start getting polished.

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