Skorj

Nothing to do with the physics engine, the context here was "can KSP and similar games degrade their graphics setting to render well on low-end graphics cards like KSP2 doesn't". Thousands of games show Unreal is good at this out of the box, and Unity is workable, because the approaches are common across all 3D games with just minor tweaking (KSP2 was just so unoptimized at its heart that all the low graphics settings still didn't get you there). BRUTAL doesn't have the benefit of being tuned for decades to provide a built-in solution to the common problem of "what's the best trade-off between graphical fidelity and render speed". Unreal just does amazingly well at rendering very high counts of the same small set of objects, which has been a big step forward for indie games. Not sure how much that would help KSP, except for enabling a surprisingly long view distance for forests or boulder fields (as long as there were only a few tree or rock models), but that alone is nice. As far as the actual physics engine and vast range of length scales, the problem is only hard if you don't want a loading pause between SOIs, Thing is, a typical "hidden loading screen" like most games have these days would be fine for interstellar travel, there's really no need to try to put multiple systems in the same scene. KSP did have some issues even in the stock system though, so I'm sympathetic to the KSA team. Personally, I'd go the other route of having one scene per planet and optimizing the transitions, but KSA has smart people working on it and I'm betting their physics engine will work great. Thank;s for that link! Very cool talk. "These textbook-type physics are very much what you'd find in a physics textbook, so when you're trying to teach about physics ..." is such a great quote about the mindset that made KSP so good.

But of course recent AAA releases look really quite bad, for all the reasons you just called out. People have been diving into why recent games just look like mush, and it's exactly what you say here. It's a sorry state of affairs, and sadly KSP2 really wasn't that much of an outlier. And with NVidia's 5000 cards we can look forward to 3 AI slop frames for every real frame. Hardware performance does gradually improve though; even if it's only 10% a year now that does add up over 10 years. I remember when the dynamic lighting for Diablo2 was amazing when you had the right video card hardware/mode, something that was lost on modern systems (even with D2R, if it's not my nostalgia goggles talking). Really though the best optimization is to lean on good art over poly count or the latest rendering gimmick. At least some indie studios have figured that out, so maybe there's hope yet.

If the game doesn't natively have a way to have visual objects floating in the sky, generated algorithmically, then a modder can't add them by just adding a skin file or an XML config file or a model, which is what the vast majority of modding is for vehicle sim games. And visuals matter to most people, which is why there are so many visual mods for so many games. Making it as easy as possible for modders who just want to add parts or skins will be a huge part of the success of any KSP successor. Being able to mod in a new solar system and new rocket parts is "replayability" for many. I spent way to much time on that game. One of these days I need to actually play Elite Dangerous,. I think the genre is very important to that discussion. There are many kinds of games where I barely care about graphics at all, but a vehicle simulator needs some amount of fidelity. It can be low-poly if the art is good enough, but there's needs to be something visual to make the game immersive. And for a KSP-like in particular, there are gas giants to explore! Jool in vanilla KSP isn't really something to explore beyond checking a box, but with the right mods you can have a probe drift between cloud layers with lightning going around you and it gives a sense of wonder, it turns Jool into a destination all its own. Mods that add interesting terrain scatters are similarly important to give a sense of "being there" on the surface of exotic planets. If Tylo and Dres and the Mun look the same from the surface, then the game devolves into "build a rocket with X delta-V, then do it again". Much less compelling. This is a real worry for KSA, with their custom engine, The built in stuff for Unity and Unreal has been good for many years. Sadly, optimizing games at any setting seems to be a lost art right now, with some recent releases struggling to render at 540p / 30 FPS and letting AI slop make it 1080p/60, which means there's no viable lower setting to degrade to in the first place. It makes me worry for any new game. But for a game that will last a while, today's ridiculous suggested specs that no one can afford are tomorrows CPU graphics, so it will eventually be fine.

They finally gained access to the Steam pages for PD games in the past few days. KSP2 is on sale now, presumably because ex-Annapurna checked the box to make all the PD games eligible for Steam sales. Hopefully they remember soon that KSP2 exists, and remove the roadmap from the store. For all my complaints about KSP2, it is technically a playable game. Deleting the roadmap would be a good start. Of course, removing it from EA entirely would be better!

In the US, the 13th amendment prevents this. It's similar in most countries. You can't force others to work for you. Steam EA has never been a contract to finish the game, it's an offer to sell an unfinished game. Seems perfectly reasonable to me: you're warned up front that the game is unfinished. Steam tells players to buy an EA game only for what it is now, not what you hope it may one day be. It's good advice. I get that's what you want EA to be. But EA is simply something different. There are no future promises involved in EA; instead it's a way to buy unfinished games. What's you're talking about goes directly against Steam's rules for developers for EA! EA is not a crowdfunding model. EA is not to be used to get the funds to finish a game. EA games must not include concrete future promises for features or other work (KSP2 has always broken that rule by having their roadmap on the store page). I certainly wasn't suggesting such. I was responding to the idea that the new notification won't work because devs are malicious and will push fake updates. But 99.9% of abandoned games aren't malicious, the dev just moved on. Steam is successful for the same reason Gabe started it: there's good money to be made by making it easier to buy a game than pirate it. Steam's continued success depends on that being true. They add value by adding convenience in finding, buying, patching, and launching games. I prefer to buy from GOG, but their recommendation engine sucks and Galaxy is annoying.

Despite the antics of AAA publishers, it is possible to be too cynical about modern gaming. There are over 50 games a day being released on Steam, and approximately 0 per day are from exploitive AAA publishers trying to scam players. The big overhyped games from huge studios that are just excuses for cash shops may represent 99% of advertising, but they're maybe 0.1% of actual game releases. Most of the games in Steam's EA program are just tiny studios trying to figure out how to make a game, or amateur efforts from people passionate about some subject. Abandoned EA games are super common simply because the sole developer lost interest, or simply no one showed up to buy the game. Or the one that really annoys me: the developer just abandons the game to start over from scratch making the same game under a different title. AAA studios will be as scammy as legally possible, and then some, but IIRC the median game on Steam has 0 current players and a 1 player 24hr peak. Sure, there are dozens of AAA games where they'd do anything to scam the players, but there are around 100,000 games on steam.

I think it's more Steam taking notice that many reviews talk about how often a game updates, and many forum posts ask whether a game is still being updated. This is a pattern across indie games in general, but especially EA games. Clearly this is information that customers care about, and that wasn't presented to them on the store page. Hopefully this will also increase the signal-to-noise ratio of reviews and forums by removing the need for so many reviews that just say "dead game" or forum posts that just ask "dead game?" Steam does take steps every year or two to keep up the usefulness of user reviews.

Funny you should say that. I just yesterday found a wallet in the couch the previous tenants left behind in my place as I was moving it out. The history of the KSP1 forums are of some value to nyone wanting to carry forward the KSP brand, assuming such a person exists. The KSP2 forums are just baggage that comes with that. You miss my point: currently adding stuff like volumetric clouds (which some would consider part of the bare minimum for a game where you can send probes into gas giants) isn't something within the realm of what most games would consider a mod. It's a whole new large part of the game that needed to be added, which is why people can get away with paid mods for it. The game would need to be designed for visual moddability in order for modders in the usual sense to add stuff like that. And it should be so designed. KSP is very much like a train sim game in this regard: there's so much room for extending the game by adding new parts and new planets, and the game needs built in support for modders adding new parts, planet data, and visuals for both in order to develop the sort of long-lasting fan community KSP has. KSP1 got away with a lot by being the first of its kind, but a modern game will need modern moddability. Adding a new part should be some XML text and some 3D asset files in one of the standard formats (or just textures for a re-skin). Am I the only one who sees the value here? Train Simulator Classic has like $20,000 worth of DLC, and Trainz a New Era has over 10,000 user-made items on the Steam Workshop IIRC. Making it easy to add new parts and new destinations can add so much life to a simulator-type game as long as the core gameplay is engaging, and the new items are visually appealing. Whether it's modders adding it, or DLC, or both, the key is making it easy to add content.

The long history of the forums is a real resource to people playing KSP1. I do hope they're kept alive in some fashion, even if only archived. I guess we'll see what the new owners think about the future of the Kerbal IP!

As far as the game engine: if the game is properly moddable, the engine doesn't matter to almost any mod. There's no reason adding parts or skins or changing the tech tree should require coding. And if it does, you shouldn't have to know the details of the game engine. At the point "game engine knowledge" really matters, you're beyond the point where the game is moddable and you're just writing game code directly. KSP has a lot of this of course, but it was mod-friendly rather than moddable. Or, put a different way, to anyone who says there can't be a huge mod community around an indie game with a custom game engine, I need reply only "Factorio". The kittens are still placeholders as far as we know, but even if it ends up being kittens due to inertia and lack of a better idea, IMO cartoon kittens (with serious expressions) and cartoon Kerbals appeal to the same audience. The actual critter doesn't matter IMO, just that it is emotionally expressive. You need your astronaut to look around in wonder when landing on a new planet, to move from fear to relief when your sad rocket finally makes it to orbit on the Nth try. Juno proved just how important that part is. I don't think it's an age thing: people don't seem to play AS kerbals, it's not an RPG, but rather as the director of the space agency sending them off to their doom. It's the difference between a physics sim game like KSP where the focus of the game is the rockets and the Kerbals are along for the ride, and a "space sim" game like Elite Dangerous, where you play the pilot, not the ship. Anyway, KSA would be the spiritual successor to KSP, not a sequel. That's fine IMO, though I'd be delighted if they get the license to change that.

To me, it's obvious this is what happened with KSP2. They had lots of people, they had lots of time, so a miss that big is clearly bad project management. People working on too many unrelated tasks and not getting the core must-have stuff done at high quality (there's also some sketchy engineering practices in there too). Now, this may have been the result of Take2 setting out silly milestone goals that forced this situation, or it may have been an unforced error, no way to tell from here. The big puzzle to me about KSP2 is how they were anywhere near meeting their milestones for T2 at the steps along the way. While all we have to go on for RW/KSA is what they say about themselves, at least what they're saying looks like good project management. I think they understand how to do it right, assuming they aren't just BSing us (and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt). So far they seem to have what it takes to deliver a worthy successor to KSP (and I'd love it if they ended up using the Kerbal IP for it). After all, all the project really needs are 3 requirements IMO: A solid moddable base engine for a rocket sim, one that isn't the crashtastic mess of KSP1. Updated graphics. I don't think they need "modern" graphics, in the sense of hundreds of people cranking out super-detailed art assets (we can live without Kerbal/Kitten shoelace physics), but a step up so that stuff like volumetric clouds and good exhaust plumes are natural to do in the engine. Some sort of actual progression system, rather than just a sandbox with random missions. Colonies building towards interstellar was just one way of many to do that. Only number 1 is actually hard IMO, the rest is just run-of-the-mill game design any competent game studio could deliver. And 1 isn't a problem to be solved by throwing a large team at it, but by a small team of the right people. There's no point in ramping up funding for the full project until 1 is proven. I'm excited for the future of some sort of KSP successor because RW seems to be doing just that. Of course, we'll see.

I would imagine ex-Annapurna has their hands full and "the KSP1 Mod Scene" is pretty far down their list to care about. Frankly, the corporate vulture will want a feast and ex-AP will be looking for deals that make quick money. For KSP that means licensing deals, and as ShadowZone mentioned if there was a Kerbals game for kids in the works, finishing that up might have prospects. The upside is: if they're hungry, licensing out the rights to the Kerbal IP to a game studio might be within reach of someone like Rocketwerkz.

Thanks to everyone who worked on getting the forums back! 60 days should be enough for ex-Annapurna to get their bearings and decide what to do with the forums. Hopefully they keep them. If nothing else, these forums are a great place to announce new KSP merch and licensing deals.

I think any team that consults with HarvesteR will get 2 sorted out. Looked like he nailed it for KitHack. 3 was a mystery to me why it's so bad. If we can abandon the "rooted tree" structure of crafts and just have parts stick together as needed, then sub-assemblies become easy and you just need a workspace where you can have multiple chunks of craft handy - like a probe bus and 3 probes - which you stick together for the final craft. Just need some place on the screen that's clearly the "real" craft and everywhere else is an area to work with sub-assemblies (or "modules" as a better name). I think it could be made very clear visually and still be far less clunky than KSP1's sub-assemblies. I would love to have an actual story or at least linked objectives (and also sandbox mode, of course). I agree anomalies are are a good way to do it, with far more rich mechanics about satellites to find them, building specific craft to go get them and so on. I'd love to see caves so you have to drive a rover in, or an underwater one on Laythe. Maybe a large alien base to discover and explore down into to get interstellar tech. Anything to make missions more than just "do I have enough delta-V"!

The Hype train is dual fuel Hopium and Copium, providing an inexhaustible supply of power. It just has to stop and take on water every so often to be steaming along again.