PDCWolf

Not like the seas haven't been sailed for this and other stuff for about 3 decades now. Good thing! We have an opening for Haveli to show just how good they are. Also use of copyrighted material for educational purposes is well covered with educational exceptions. Yeah no, I wasn't talking about Australia because I clearly stated I don't know their laws. As for the bit you copypasted... Any bit of spyware (windows itself and a lot of apps) installed could rat you out to law enforcement for something as dumb as modding a game lmao.

Not if it happens in the privacy of my home, for my own use, without connecting to servers or multiplayer sessions. What's a mess is that it's gonna be dependent on how hard do developers/publishers want to police their singleplayer games. I've heard some devs being against their games being modded (they mention offensive mods but really you ALL should know the slippery slope by now) and I'm sure those over-reaching parasites would be happy to ban you from your own 80 USD singleplayer game because you downloaded a bikini mod if they had a chance to police that through DRM or other cancerware. So to state again: What I do with KSP1 and KSP2 games (which lack any sort of controlling DRM or call-home policing tool) in the privacy of my home, is not in Haveli's capacity to police (yet, and thanks to those games not having DRM) So the concept of "unauthorized copy" doesn't apply, in the exact same vein your local copy of Frozen can be toyed around with because Disney has no way of knowing. What I won't be able to do (if Haveli so desires) is to distribute mods created with bepinex or whatever other injection/decompilation method is out there, and in some universe out there, I won't be able to join KSP2 MP lobbies with a modded game. Australian law escapes me, but what doesn't escape me is the concept of the Fourth Amendment, which would probably fare well enough if brought up in the case of the FF losers trying to take me to court over my self-made bikini Tifa mods.

This is where we're forced to depart from the theft/other crime analogies. Those DO have a time limit to report them on some jurisdictions, or the fine/jail time diminishes as time since the crime was committed passes. Copyright infringement does not. You could use this retroactively to send C&Ds to mods, or block further distribution of said mods. Obviously, if taken to court, modders could argue that the climate in the forums was developers and T2 being in the know and even supporting said mods at the time, which'd be a huge factor in lessening the impact, even dismissing the case completely. However what I said first would still apply: Cease development and distribution or you will be committing a crime now under the new rules of the game. Watching is not the case here. Watching would mean you obtained it illegally by a distributor who themselves is in violation of copyright law by producing unauthorized copies or doing unauthorized public broadcasts of the media. This here is very different and almost nothing like how media copyright is managed can be applied to this. What you do with your legally bought copy of Disney's Frozen, in the privacy of your home, provided you don't distribute copies, or broadcast it, is entirely your business. Wanna dub over the musicals? Wanna deepfake your face onto Elsa? You can absolutely do that, so long as you do it for yourself and not create/distribute publicly accessible copies of it. In the case of KSP2, you can absolutely decompile it, look at the decompile code, alter it, and recompile it, you can inject data onto the memory addresses of it, you can do literally whatever with it, even backing it up in 8 septillion individual copies hosted in a tape NAS. No one can act on that simply because the tools are not there to police that. However, if you were to distribute your modifications, or create unsolicited copies of the game with your mods... or invite a T2 (or now Haveli) employee to watch whatever you did to the game, then yeah, you can absolutely be prosecuted for it. The point of legal inflection is distributing altered copyrighted material (or the tools to facilitate others altering it, such as bepinex + some mod), which now is being infringed in two ways: Unauthorized distribution of a copy, unauthorized use of altered copyrighted material (or the tools to alter it, as it was the specific case of the cheats).

Due how the legal system work, this is the outcome if there's a charge brought up against someone. US courts most probably won't act ex officio with state-initiated prosecutions on cases such as these. So what really has changed is that the door has now been opened and there's precedent as you said, but you still need the legal department of T2/Haveli/Whoever to want to walk through it and seek to prosecute a modder for doing their thing. Basically no report > no crime, even if now there's precedent for the legal system to penalize such an action, the legal system won't come for you without someone accusing you. Further on, KSP1, KSP2 both have precedent for developers and T2 authorities allowing a modding scene to take place, even knowing such modding scene was making use of reverse engineering, injection and decompiling tools. This muddies the water a lot and since we're talking about mud, I will not pass up another opportunity to throw more dirt at T2: KSP1 was part of their lineup and so was, for a while, under the same EULA KSP2 was. The forum rules and addon posting guidelines also weren't updated during this time to clarify the situation. Haveli also hasn't done anything about this... but them not doing anything is what we know them for so far... Still, someone should really come out and clarify this mess. Last but not least: What you do with your copy of the game in your disk drive, in the privacy of your own home (thus, you don't upload it), is entirely your business.

Turns out this video also ends up being a great class for when someone forgets how to make development blog videos or how to talk about topics in the game.

That's what I meant with my "being a hindrance" comment. They're gonna make it so much more of a lose-lose for havelli-annapurna to approach KSP2 than it was before. Forum's kind of against Haveli too with threads about decompiling and reverse engineering being left up despite reports.

Neither game has DRM, you could potentially upload your local files and that's a playable copy for whoever downloads it, so technically making the game open source does not make it necessarily any easier to pirate. Depending on how the code and assets were provided... it'd still be easier (if you just want to play) to pirate the game than compiling it. Steam is used as a distribution storefront, the game doesn't use any drm, you can just move the folder, click the exe and it'll work.

Hope their legal side is pristine. Having this up gives Haveli another reason to not touch the game... or to stamp them out if they feel like continuing KSP2. Heck, if the mod is actually good it's gonna be even more trouble. This is not the correct course of action... specially considering the EULA remaining the same after the transition.

I know this is a... complicated thing and I'm totally with you on the fact that it's abandoned and they'll never touch it again. However, it technically isn't cancelled nor completed so it's within the framework of something that can be picked up and continued (which again, I doubt they'll do, Ex-PD has tons of problems in their basket right now to bother looking at KSP2). I will however direct you to the effort for this to happen for KSP1 which, although just as likely to happen, it'd at least be a much more useful source than whatever Frankeinstein's monster they made KSP2 to be.

Huh, did not catch that, nice!

SWDennis has posted a video showing the newest stuff they've worked into the game. Of course everything is a WIP and has been exfiltrated from their discord.

Dear god, can the forum maintainers, across apparently 2 different owners, stop embarrassing themselves? Either keep it up and don't touch stuff, or take it down already.

Ah fences! I didn't realize this was a huge necro.

I don't know the type of discussion you're looking for, but with 10+ years in this forum I can tell you how it ends: "Nbody is cool" "Nbody is too complex and nobody would pick the game up" "Nbody is expensive to run" (a fallacy) "Nbody would destroy -niche thing this poster does in his game-" "Nbody is just not fun" (because fun is clearly objectively measurable) "But NASA uses patched conics" (a literal lie) "I have no idea what Nbody is but I have an opinion" But yeah, at the end of the day talking about the inclusion of N-Body simulation, bigger planets, axial tilt (back in the day), and so on and so forth, literally ANYTHING that isn't vanilla KSP, ends up like this known XKCD comic:

The whole video is gold, specially because some solutions were being applied -at least on a title soon to be popular- for the first time. Also there's some clearly lost art of the kraken, early versions, and so on. It's an absolute treasure trove. Compared to this...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvytgzvqlgQ which now is fired people central talking about things they copied from KSP1, things they never got to put on the game, and planet tech that was completely mangled by their bad art-style (and for the convention they show in a more neutral art style). They also talk about interplanetary lighting... on a game where they never cracked eclipses because 'interplanetary lighting' was clearly a fickle fabrication. Still, that second video also showcases the scaled-space trick. Funnily enough KSP1 uses(d?) a scene up to 6km big for vehicular operations, think driving rovers, meanwhile KSP2 never managed to properly work the origin shift at their much smaller 2.5km.

So far that's been handled by the scaled space planetarium method, no asset is actively (for realsies) at more than 2.5km from the player (I've seen a number like 1/600000 claimed), at least as far as I know. I however claim 0 knowledge about how they do this in KSA.

I wouldn't say hope, it's a simple balance of effort: They already had the chance to shed the forum off when assets were passed over to them, would be really weird if they went through that effort to transfer the dns, very probably the hosting service, and only to say "nah" when the bill for the license hits. Of course I can't say it's 100% what's gonna happen, just that it'd be very weird of them to do that.

I'll say that if they wanted the forum gone they just wouldn't have gone through the trouble of transferring the DNS and very probably the hosting service. They'll probably pay when the date draws nearer.

Yes and no... in KSP2 we were still facing the same middleware bugs for example (orientation of arrows for gizmos in the VAB being the most obvious). Unity itself... still has the same limitations it had long ago, they've just pushed the limits some but really many iterations of rigidbodies are still difficult to handle, much more multithread consistently (the whole unity physics thing is really bad and unoptimized at scale), serialization sucks when you need to save tons of data, video playback tech is really poor, compilation for other platforms is shoddy as hell, and so on, and the answer to that for Unity only is "buy the license so you can dive into the source and fix it yourself". No tech is upscaling from that low a resolution, you'd lose too much detail to upscale from. You'd at least upscale from 720p like previous-gen consoles and that'd still look hideous, like previous-gen consoles. Framegen also doesn't work great if you don't have 60+ FPS as a base, it just makes input latency shot up the roof. The minimum for good-looking upscaling is like 1440p from 1080p... and for framegen, you'd want to use it to bump say from 90fps to 144fps for a high refresh rate monitor, not for 30 to 60. The problem with "optimizing" the current graphical tech implanted in off-the-shelf engines is that you'd really be paying just buy the license for source access and then you'd still need to do the work yourself. So you'll see most lowish budget titles either run with what's default (discounting any extra misuse of tech) or implement pre-packaged alternatives, which also won't be optimized by them (either by license impossibilities or because there's no time and resources to do the work). But don't worry, this will get worse, as most studios have already shifted to Unreal Engine 5 to cut down dev time and costs so the garbage games they put out at least become cheaper and faster to make and it's easier to break even. So when I say we're about to face a generation of absolute slop, I'm not lying, being a cynic or a doomer. Even studios which are supposed to run their own engines (RE Engine for example) have clearly pre-packaged solutions "motivated" by money under the table from Nvidia, so even games not made in UE5 will still enjoy the crutch that is just throwing whatever garbage you have at DLSS and hoping it passes 60fps. MHWilds looks HIDEOUS, and it barely runs in a justifiable way for how garbage it looks, even if you were to somehow think the looks are similar. Meanwhile we're 4 generations into "RTX" hardware and real time raytracing is -barely- playable without fake frames and upscaling. We're not in the 90s anymore, Moore's law is dead, and we're also slowly walking out of the generalized rendering era back into the wild west early videocards used to be (remember when you had to pick a rendering mode before starting a game?)

I mean, not even this thread has been stopped... Imagine.

I kinda was there, as an infant having to watch my dad deal with his soundblasters as his FM stations (he owned like 3, some of the first in the country, let alone the town) had him jump aboard the PC era very early for automating multiple aspects of them. However as you talk about buying new hardware, remember we're starting from a minimum of what should be a 3060, that's a 3 years old card, and people with 2070s are still in the fight too with their 7 years old hardware. If you further discount obligatory raytracing, people with 1080ti are going on even stronger with their 8 years old cards. That's not new hardware at all, even the most recent of those is 2 generations old now. It's really not about buying new hardware, as most games really do support the 2070 or 3060 at their lowest levels (rip those who got scammed with a 4060) My deepest condolences. Remember we're neighbors and at some point our presidents were aligned in their red-tape. We still 'enjoy' having to pay up to 50% tax on purchases made to foreign sources, no matter what is bought, even books. Still... most people that upgraded during the pandemic are -just fine-, and will be fine for a good chunk of the upcoming unreal engine spam era. In fact, thanks to this and thanks to the economic conditions, the fact that new hardware isn't pushing the envelope as hard as it was back at the turn of the millennium, it's not hard to see we're about to live one of the longest generations of hardware as people are incapable of upgrading or refuse to because generational uplifts are gone whilst prices keep climbing. Still, my point stands, we're not talking about RTX 5XXX series and RX 9XXX series, we're talking about hardware from 7 years ago still having a really good chance at not just being compatible, but being able to push games properly beyond playability. Volumetric clouds and other things talked about in this thread are nowhere near requiring current gen stuff, and it's clear the biggest majority of gamers have that hardware... which is why I don't really buy that games are failing because people don't have the hardware. But at this point, I have two suggestions: Let's not keep hogging this thread. Let's wait for less controversial games people are actually looking forward to to see if it's really hardware or games being garbage or some mix or both.

Because he's only reviled by a vocal, increasingly ignored, increasingly minoritarian group. This thread should really be locked before it turns into outright politics rather than implied politics. Forgot to mention, anyone who doesn't instantly show disgust at Musk a stan doesn't help.

Because games stopped being fun around 7 years ago. We all here play KSP1 because KSP2 is garbage, and tKSP1 is like 13 years old at least from release. No competitive shooter has beaten CS, No moba has beaten Dota and LoL. No BattleRoyale has beaten Fortnite and PUBG. No live service has beaten Destiny 2 or Warframe. No vehicle combat game has beaten War Thunder/World Of ---. No farming game has beaten Stardew Valley. No workplace sim has beaten Farming Simulator... GTA remains unbeaten too, Baldur's Gate 3 is probably the newest thing that got some traction... Civ VII failed to beat VI, Cities Skylines 2 failed to beat one. And so on and so forth but new offerings for those exist... However, the Steam survey clearly shows It's not hardware. 70% of people have computers that can absolutely run everything that's come out, even the RT obligatory Indiana Jones game (which was garbage). You'll probably see this picture painted more clearly when Doom TDA comes out and it's not as drowned in controversy as most modern titles, and actually gets played by a large playerbase. It's not hardware at all, it's absolute garbage games making people stick to previous releases and classics. And to further prove that, I'm pretty sure that Avowed, the new Assassin's Creed, MHWilds, KF3 and others fail one on top of the other even though 80% of the entire steam userbase can run them.

I think the fact this isn't done more often is the evidence needed to support the theory that the 'gains' in fact do not overweight all the extra costs. Because it is. There's zero business comparing a time back in the day where off-the-shelf engines where not a thing, to nowadays where not only are they impervious, but so is pre-packaged physics/graphics/UI middleware. Even RE-Engine on MHWilds has all the hallmark artifacts and quirks of pre-packaged upscaling and frame generation suites (and looks horrible with or without, like most gen 9 games). Back in the day, you'd work your way up implementing something like volumetric clouds, having to do it all yourself. We could probably assume the testing overhead is the same in both cases, sure, but what'll never be the same is that nowadays you'd have to work your way down into engine/middleware (normally a black box) code to see how deep the implementation of volumetrics is to see what can even be toggled off without breaking the whole thing. It's not the same workload and the capacity to work it into the code in a modular way is not a thing unless you want to, again, dive down to disable as much as you can, and then redo it all yourself which is still more work. When you consider that modern engines are black boxes (you need paid versions to be able to enter the source code and even then you can't just do whatever), then you'll realize the workload is completely different, and massive, and also limited by the black box scenario and that you really don't know if it's possible. Even for the two most popular engines, there's gonna be -very- little people diving into the engine source code, or worse, middleware source code to help you... both of which make the cost of development for the graphic setting and the testing overhead bigger and bigger.

At the level of off-the-shelf engines, yes. Off-the-shelf stuff offers easy ways to implement 'good looks', with one of the most popular being the paid version of unity (before their whole debacle) offering almost one click post-processing effects that looked gorgeous. It's much more than 1%, even for something basic like say you enable those post-processing effects... In engine that's a rendering flag that conjures up some pre-made shaders near the end of the rendering pipeline, honestly one of the 'easiest' options to make toggleable... however that will derive in creating UI work to present the option to the customer, testing time to test the proper workings of said option (especially if you change unity versions down the line!) and it will duplicate visual inspections to see that things look correct with and without the PP shaders correctly. And again, that's just shaders, which in that particular case are really dumb, simple, lightweight end of the line shaders. Things like volumetrics (clouds, fog, sometimes even lighting) are much deeper and much more crucial to the rendering pipeline, so much so in most games you aren't even allowed to outright turn them off, just simplify them. And in the games you are allowed to turn them off? Most times your feedback will no longer be taken into account because you've destroyed the lighting of every scene, the expected view distance, and so on. Unlike shaders, this would need to be tested in different graphics APIs, different graphics card vendors (Remember how KSP2 clouds had issues at first with all AMD cards and then with AMD RX 6XXX cards?) and couple with different settings to see what breaks and what looks bad. It's a ton of overhead, much more than 1-2%. TL;DR For toggling graphics settings, the most you can hope for is the toggle already comes in the game engine you're using, meaning the work is just a couple hours to get the UI to have the option, and then some small overhead of testing on every version, a bit bigger when you change unity versions. If the setting involves changing to different shaders, or changing to different qualities of textures or meshes, then you're looking at days of work, days of design making the lower resolution assets, and you've basically at least duplicated your testing load by having to test scenes in multiple settings. You're also now testing performance, which requires a ton of probing, measuring, and tracking of data to see if the option is having the expected impact. If your setting requires different rendering techniques (volumetric to static for example, as you can't outright remove clouds or fog), or LODding of meshes, or anything that requires multiple versions of assets, you're looking at months of production work to create the assets and effects, and then you're looking at rigorous testing that has to take place in different hardware configurations, driver versions, and so on.