No New Comms System in 1.1

[Xavven]

5 hours ago, ajburges said:

I definitely feel like a minority here. Since 1.0.5 I've been waiting for the new antenna features. I figure they will require space program paradigm changes that would really bork a campaign running the old system.

Would rather wait longer than be tempted by an upgrade just to have a career save killed by changing core mechanics.

Same here. While it may not be the majority opinion of this forum, it's disappointing to me to see major gameplay-altering features get pushed back. It disrupts saves. On the other hand, it's hard to complain about Squad providing new features for no additional cost to me personally. First world problems!

[Wallygator]

I feel compelled to present my dissenting party point of view.

As an OSX user, I have pretty much abandoned all hope (Queue clip from Space: Above and beyond please...) regarding the concepts of KSP performance. I have now placed myself into a conceptual "protective escape capsule" that can only be opened when performance has improved - and whilst inside, I have retain no expectations that such performance will ever exist.  Naturally, I have accepted the crap performance I must live with and therefore demand more content to keep me occupied and entertained until someone brings a "KSP performance improvement hatchet" and cracks open my conceptual "protective escape capsule". Thank you and rep in advance to the entity that performs this action. 

And finally, to quote a once great entertainer, "Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are."

 

[NeoMorph]

On 05/02/2016 at 5:42 AM, steve_v said:

Good call on dropping the stock RT thing, suggest you focus on performance and bugfixes instead.

No new features == no worries... so long as we do get 64bit for Windows and performance back up to pre-1.0 levels - at the very least.
Honestly, I have zero interest in any Shiny New S*** until the pervasive performance issues are sorted.

I've been waiting literally years for respectable performance, bring on 1.1... the release where the game starts to perform like a professional product rather than a tech-demo, and the "engine" bugs we all know and hate actually get fixed...
Or not.

If we still get GC stutter and single-digit framerates after 1.1 I will most likely be ditching this game for good.

I only get single digit framerates if I overload the game with mods... and I REALLY overload my game because I must have Deadly Reentry, RemoteTech, FAR, Mechjeb, Kerbal Engineer, etc... basically all the things that make it more challenging. Then I like addons like KWRocketry, Chaka Monkey Exploration, the NearFuture parts packs, etc, etc until the game gets really crappy... then I pare away what I don't use until I get a playable build. I also force the game to use " -force-opengl" in the shortcut to give me some more speed... and it works.

I still need a better PC, and of course the 64 bit sorting out but like you Steve, I would prefer to see optimisation and bug fixes before new stuff is added. When you add new stuff onto creaky foundations you end up with the Leaning Tower of Pisa Kerbin.

Personally though, I think I will still be playing this game on my deathbed...

[Vermil]

I consider this good news, since I was a bit concerned about all the complications such a new system could bring. Giving it more time is the right call. I don't really get the impression people are terribly impatient for this to happen, either.

 

[steve_v]

2 hours ago, NeoMorph said:

When you add new stuff onto creaky foundations you end up with the Leaning Tower of Pisa Kerbin

It feels like I've been watching this exact scenario playing out with each new release - more and more CPU intensive features added atop an engine that clearly cannot handle even the base game at reasonable performance levels. Adding mods to this "extremely moddable" game only compounds the issue.

In this day-and-age I expect release-quality games to have release-quality performance.
Every other game I have runs just great, including shiny new titles like FO4 - I get consistent v-sync 60FPS on at least "high" settings.
I'll take a graphical fidelity hit or turn off features to achieve smooth FPS if I have to, I'll even buy new hardware if that's what it takes. My problem with KSP is that there is exactly nothing the player can do to improve performance of the lousy physics engine - the game chugs along at miserable FPS while my GPU twiddles it's thumbs and 3/4 of my CPU goes idle.

I am well aware of the reasons for this, but after several years hearing them I am through listening to the lame "unity limitation" excuses.

Someone brings up the well-known stutter, and the response we get is "better things to do" / "new features = more meaningful improvement".

I don't care if it pushes back the release or puts new features on the back-burner, Fix. Performance.

 

Seems the powers that be are keeping very quiet on what kind of performance improvement we can expect from 1.1, and details on how effectively the new PhysX is multithreaded are hard to come by.
This does not inspire optimism.

How about some benchmarks to show off the improvements? It'd go a long way towards allaying my concerns.
Surely someone has done such testing internally before making the vague "better performance" claims I have encountered, show me the numbers so I can stop complaining.

Edited February 6, 2016 by steve_v

[Starhawk]

19 minutes ago, steve_v said:

Seems the powers that be are keeping very quiet on what kind of performance improvement we can expect from 1.1, and details on how effectively the new PhysX is multithreaded are hard to come by.

This does not inspire optimism.

How about some benchmarks to show off the improvements? It'd go a long way towards allaying my concerns.
Surely someone has done such testing internally before making the vague "better performance" claims I have encountered, show me the numbers so I can stop complaining.

There were some pretty strong hints during Squadcast that performance has improved significantly, and they mentioned making some announcement in the next couple of weeks.  I could easily have misheard/misunderstood what was being said, but it sounded like.that announcement was related to performance improvements.

Happy landings!

[severedsolo]

35 minutes ago, steve_v said:

Seems the powers that be are keeping very quiet on what kind of performance improvement we can expect from 1.1, and details on how effectively the new PhysX is multithreaded are hard to come by.
 

Of course they have. Every PC (even with the same hardware) is different. As an example, I bought fallout 4 fully expecting it to not run on my PC because I fall underneath the minimum specs on more than one front. It plays beautifully on this PC. I've seen people who did have the recommended specs report extreme FPS lag. I can't explain it, but I'm not complaining.

If Squad come out and say "on our rigs we've noticed a 125% performance increase" (for example) somebody who only gets 110% is probably going to complain. Better to be vague. Suffice to say, it's probably going to be better than what we've already got (64 bit alone!). It certainly can't be any worse.

[steve_v]

51 minutes ago, severedsolo said:

Every PC (even with the same hardware) is different.

So identical hardware isn't identical...  Horses***. This is the kind of excuse I regularly hear from those who have no idea how the things work. Computers are not magical, they perform to well understood metrics, traceable right back to the underlying physics.

Yes, there's a lot of variation in PC configurations, but the same code executing on the same hardware will perform near enough to exactly the same. Otherwise any benchmark would be worthless.
All one needs to do to avoid this confusion is release the specs of the test system, it's a critical requirement of any useful benchmark.

51 minutes ago, severedsolo said:

I can't explain it

Then don't present anecdotes as evidence. Hint: FO4 has lots of knobs, and can be configured to run reasonably well on hardware well below spec. KSP has none that have any worthwhile effect on the obvious CPU bottleneck.

51 minutes ago, severedsolo said:

It certainly can't be any worse.

LOL. surely you've been around here long enough to know better than that. I's been getting steadily worse for some time.

Edited February 6, 2016 by steve_v

[sjwt]

13 minutes ago, steve_v said:

So identical hardware isn't identical...  Horses***. This is the kind of excuse I regularly hear from those who have no idea how the things work. Computers are not magical, they perform to well understood metrics, traceable right back to the underlying physics.

Generally that refers to things like different branded versions of the same graphics card, IE a Gigabyte version VS ASUS, but even then you can think you have the same and there is an invisible Revision number, I have a mouse that should be identical to the one I replaced that was faulty, turns out its a slightly earlier revision and dose not have updatable firmware, but its sold as exactly the same hardware. 

And we all know two "identical" cpus can both OC differently, same with Ram and Video cards and even Hard Drives, each of these ship with different amounts of accetable flaws within. 

[steve_v]

1 hour ago, sjwt said:

Generally that refers to things like different branded versions of the same graphics card...
<anecdote>...
And we all know two "identical" cpus can both OC differently, same with Ram and Video cards and even Hard Drives, each of these ship with different amounts of accetable flaws within. 

True, but an OCd part or one from a different manufacturer is not identical hardware.
Again: this is why detailed hardware specifications accompany any real benchmark. Given that KSPs performance issues are almost entirely CPU performance issues, and overclocking is an obvious, easily eliminated skew, there's no real reason not to produce a controlled benchmark. CPUs of the same make-and-model, at the same clock, with the same microcode will perform close enough for our purposes.

All you have to say is: We tested on <detailed hardware/software spec> at <settings>, and include the error margin from multiple runs. It won't be exact across different manufacturers, and possibly even firmware/microcode revisions... but if you specify these in the test environment there's no confusion and no false expectations.

It's really not that hard, there are many websites devoted to such testing, and by-and-large results do correlate.

I don't expect Squad to use remotely the same hardware that I have or spend time testing on 50 different configurations, so I'll never anticipate exactly the same numbers. It'd still provide a useful delta, and even a not-directly-comparable benchmark is better than no data at all - especially if the 1.1 improvement is as large as some are speculating.

1 hour ago, sjwt said:

...even Hard Drives

Erm, really? I've yet to see anyone OC a HDD... source?

---

Since we're so fond of sample-size-of-one evidence here, I'll add some more:

A couple of years ago, I benchmarked DooM3 on two systems I was building from spare bits. Both had Q6600s and 8800GTs - different OEMs for both motherboard and GPU (same clock though)... I got an average of 2 FPS difference - this is well within the error margin of repeated tests on the same machine.

Edited February 6, 2016 by steve_v

[DoToH]

10 months after release and the game is still unfinished. Seems like we will never get a proper performance and bugfix update if they keep adding (and delaying) stuff.

I like new features, but I expect from a RELEASED game to perform better than alpha builds and I want to keep my  save without having to deorbit or modify every satellite or station because some new feature that should have been added before release or not added at all.

That's why I don't play KSP since 1.0. Maybe it's cool for people who don't exit Kerbin's SOI, but not for me. I'd like to play my save for a long time, so I won't play KSP until they stop adding new game breaking features and begin to focus on performance. I have more games to play until KSP is finished (if ever).

[WuphonsReach]

On 2/5/2016 at 7:13 AM, sackfalte said:

One thing I would like to see is for the entire UI to be scaleable, not only the Flight UI.

I have a 28" 4K screen, and KSP looks spectacular in that resolution, but when building something in the VAB/SPH, the item's icons and descriptions are illegible, unless I move my head closer to the screen. A simple scaling option would be awesome.

Yeah, I have to run KSP in 1440p resolution, which keeps things readable, but still gives me a bit more room on the screen over 1080p resolution.  Hoping that Unity 5 is better about UI scaling.

[CloudlessEchoes]

5 hours ago, steve_v said:

How about some benchmarks to show off the improvements? It'd go a long way towards allaying my concerns.

Surely someone has done such testing internally before making the vague "better performance" claims I have encountered, show me the numbers so I can stop complaining.

Why should they, you won't believe whatever they come up with anyway. And the release isn't done yet. You're complaining about something that doesn't even exist as a product yet.

Myself and many others haven't had any real issues with performance, and I have a far cry from a high end spec PC. My graphics settings are all turned to max. Every PC does perform differently, there are so many combinations of components, drivers, OS condition, etc. I've gotten so many hours out of KSP because it's such a fun experience, it's the game I wished existed 20 years ago.

I'm excited to hear that they're dropping this feature to speed up release, I'm sure there will be plenty of things to fix because of the unity migration so it should come first.

[steve_v]

18 minutes ago, CloudlessEchoes said:

You're complaining about something that doesn't even exist as a product yet.

No, I'm complaining about the performance of the current release, and asking how much improvement 1.1 will bring.

An announcement along the lines of "1.1 coming soon^TM, with X% better performance <insert pretty benchmark graphs here>" is going to perk up my ears far more than any variation of "we're adding cool new feature/part Y <promo pics here>" Particularly as mods already add much the same (or better) content.

Edited February 6, 2016 by steve_v

[Raptor9]

Hopefully the expandable heatshield @RoverDude was working on is still planned for 1.1

[I_Killed_Jeb]

11 hours ago, CloudlessEchoes said:

Myself and many others haven't had any real issues with performance, and I have a far cry from a high end spec PC.

I agree with your general points but this sticks out at me. If you haven't had performance issues in KSP either you're never in atmo or you're launching tiny rockets with no debris.

[Pixel Kola]

So one of the only things that might make KSP not so blah anymore is being delayed.. to probably 2017. Does Squad have a project manager? Seems like quite an unorganized bunch. I know a dozen or so Unity devs and they say what Squad is doing can be done in weeks with competent devs.

But hey, at least we'll have more in-depth blah contracts that still won't be logical and still won't make any sense.. The only thing 1.1 will do is make an EJ stream watchable now with his 2,000 part transport ships. They might not be slide-shows now... but then again, this is Squad so I wouldn't be surprised to see very little actual difference in play.

[magnemoe]

On 5.2.2016 at 1:14 AM, Starhawk said:

I'm hearing you guys about how unexpectedly difficult and yet still worthwhile the ugrade to Unity 5 is.

I support your decision to hold back this feature in order to expedite 1.1.  I think it's a good call.

I was somewhat surprised by some of the negativity in the Squadcast chat, but that's the internet for you.

Happy landings!

Unity 5 allows for more than 3.8GB ram, making it worth it even if no new features. 
Memory limit is not only an limit for mods but also new features in KSP. 
 

[magnemoe]

11 hours ago, Raptor9 said:

Hopefully the expandable heatshield @RoverDude was working on is still planned for 1.1

Probably, its just an part, not an entirely new system who will affect lots of other stuff. 

Any info about this? it does not look practical on the bottom of something only top. is it an 2.5 meter part? Look huge for 2.5 meter but don't see the point of an 1.25 meter inflatable shield as you can use 2.5 or 3.73 meter ones? And yes I can see lots of uses for it. 
 

[klgraham1013]

18 hours ago, DoToH said:

10 months after release and the game is still unfinished.

They made it pretty clear that 1.0 didn't mean "finished."  Contributing to the meme that 1.0 no longer means anything.

[steve_v]

6 hours ago, I_Killed_Jeb said:

If you haven't had performance issues in KSP either you're never in atmo or you're launching tiny rockets with no debris.

Well, going by posts elsewhere on this forum, some consider ~20FPS "great" performance.

35 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Unity 5 allows for more than 3.8GB ram

Excuse my ignorance (or the fragmentary information from Squad), but has stable Win64 actually been confirmed for 1.1? What about on OSX?

 

Edited February 7, 2016 by steve_v

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, steve_v said:

Well, going by posts elsewhere on this forum, some consider ~20FPS "great" performance.

Excuse my ignorance (or the fragmentary information from Squad), but has stable Win64 actually been confirmed for 1.1? What about on OSX?

 

Well 64 bit is the main purpose of going for unity 5. has been some talk about it but not too much details.
Secondary is better performance and performance will be situation dependent, it looks to me that docking two ships or landing close to an base will give less lag but huge ships will not benefit so much. 

Lag mostly depend on size of rockets. 
 

Edited February 7, 2016 by magnemoe

[BananaTime101]

I feel like i can wait for antenna range. I was looking forward to the other features more in 1.1 anyway and if this slightly speeds up the process, I think its worth it. 

[Curveball Anders]

1 hour ago, Mods_o_joy said:

How hard is it to Implement a Community Mod into the game?, We have this already in Mod form

Going from a community mod that seems to work for the fraction of users that have installed it is quite far from adding stuff to stock where it has to work for all users on all platforms.

[Raptor9]

3 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Probably, its just an part, not an entirely new system who will affect lots of other stuff. 

Any info about this? it does not look practical on the bottom of something only top. is it an 2.5 meter part? Look huge for 2.5 meter but don't see the point of an 1.25 meter inflatable shield as you can use 2.5 or 3.73 meter ones? And yes I can see lots of uses for it. 
 

I already made a KSP-analogue to this mars lander concept by Boeing...just need the heatshield now

But yeah, no clue how big the base mount will be.  As it stands, the 3.75m heatshield is just barely wide enough to cover my lander diameter, not that Duna really has much atmosphere though.

Edited February 7, 2016 by Raptor9