Questions to SQUAD

[PatPL]

Hi!

I just wanted to ask you some questions about KSP.

1) Do you use Javascript or C# for scrpits in KSP? Maybe mix of both?

2) Do you use any Unity Add-Ons?

3) How messed up is your hierarchy in scenes in editor?

4) What's your modelling/texturing/coding software?

Thanks in advance.

[problemecium]

I'm not SQUAD but I can answer this.

1. Both. KSP is mostly C# but there's some JavaScript mixed in too.

2. Very very probably. Like 99% probability, and not just third-party add-ons but add-ons they made themselves. In fact KSP PartTools probably counts.

3. Horrendous. The Tracking Station and Flight scenes, for instance, have dozens of GUI elements as well as a number of objects in charge of managing persistent variables used by other scenes. It gets even worse if you build or load any ships.

4. Okay this one I don't know. I think they use Maya and MS Visual Studio a lot.

[Alshain]

They have spoke of the Unity addons before, I think some of them were in the UI that may be removed in the next version.

[Archgeek]

What oh what would JS be doing in a full non-web-browser-hosted game? Does Unity really use Javascript for things?

[Robotengineer]

I think they use 3DMax for modeling, not completely sure though.

[EladDv]

What oh what would JS be doing in a full non-web-browser-hosted game? Does Unity really use Javascript for things?

you can program in unity in 3 languages - C# JavaScript and Boo

[cantab]

JavaScript ... Really ... Well, no wonder

[Carraux]

1. Both. KSP is mostly C# but there's some JavaScript mixed in too.

As far as I know, it's quite the opposite. Most of the stuff is done in UnityScript (kind of JavaScript) with some coding in C#.

Although UnityScript is only a little slower than C#, it is much more prone to errors (I wouldn't have chosen it for a project like this)

[Moach]

I'm not a part of the Squad Dev Crew, but being twins with HarvesteR and a Unity-powered developer myself allows me answering a few of these for you.

KSP is made with C#, I suppose exclusively (JS is uh... not hmm, say: "good") - even though Unity allows both used together seamlessly, and compiles to the same end result, JS does lack the more "elegant" features that make complex projects like this more manageable by a couple orders of magnitude

Plugins in use, to the best of my knowledge include at the very least the popular "Vectrosity" -- this is what renders the lines and vector graphics you see on map view and such - I cannot confirm to any others specifically, but I'm nevertheless sure there are very well being used

there is no justifiable reason not to use stuff from the asset store when working with Unity...

it'd be utter madness to spend such large amounts of specialized (expensive) programmer work for putting together boilerplate functionality that can be acquired ready made for plug-and-play at prices often much lower than a day's worth of a dev's work -- I know from my own experience what a godsend these plugins are, specially with a minimally-sized indie crew (like Squad)

I dare not ask my brother how messed up the scene hierarchy has become in the multitude of scenes that make up KSP over it's almost-half-decade of development -- sometimes it's better of to leave oneself not knowing the sheer extent of such madness... even my own code feels alien to me after weeks working on other aspects... and scene setups in Unity do have that tendency to spaghettify into a mind-blistering peat bog of entropy -- I dread the answer to that question as much as any developer protective of the scant remains of what little sanity he still has well should

Lastly, I do believe Autodesk Maya and 3dsMax rule the 3d modelling industry these days -- KSP being no exception... myself and HarvesteR are trained in 3dsMax, which was leading the front back during our university days - more lately, Maya started making a strong push, specially for animation - for games however, it's still a pretty good mix of those two

For coding, the usual: Visual Studio... C# is best handled by the IDE made by the very same company that cooked up the language itself (M$) -- little else (nothing, to my knowledge) provides a better suited tool, to nobody's surprise, really...

that's as much as I got... any more specific, you'd have to ask devs themselves...

very interesting questions tho -- fellow developer, are we? I suppose

Edited August 17, 2015 by Moach