Fresh Blood

[severedsolo]

The OP started in 1.1 and nobody mentions part counts or memory limits? Guess I'm up:

Before 1.1 came along, KSP ran on Unity 4 (it now runs on Unity 5, apologies if you already know that). The Physx calculations in Unity 4 were... not great. You could build a reasonable largeish rocket and regularly run up against time-step issues (that is, the game couldn't calculate Physx fast enough, so you'd either drop frames, or the calcs would not be as accurate, depending on your settings). Nowadays, it's rare (if ever) that I run up against this.

The Windows x64 client was non-existent. One day (around about 0.24 I believe) - some enterprising people, figured out that you could run KSP on the Unity 4 x64 Windows client, but it was a hot mess. The devs then released an official Win64 client, with the caveat "it's buggy as hell". Many people did not read this last bit, complained that mods were not working properly (when it was Unity that wasn't working properly). mod makers got angry and basically stopped their mods from running on Win64.

Because we Windows players were stuck on 32 bit, we had a hard memory limit of about 3.7GB. This meant you had to limit the amount of mods you installed, because if you exceeded that, the game would crash. To make matters worse - the game had a bug where memory usage would increase every time you changed scenes. This meant that you were on a timer before you hit that limit, and the game crashed.

Wow - as I'm typing this, I find myself thinking "why on earth did you put up with all this" - I must REALLY like this game.

[wumpus]

11 hours ago, severedsolo said:

The OP started in 1.1 and nobody mentions part counts or memory limits? Guess I'm up:

Before 1.1 came along, KSP ran on Unity 4 (it now runs on Unity 5, apologies if you already know that). The Physx calculations in Unity 4 were... not great. You could build a reasonable largeish rocket and regularly run up against time-step issues (that is, the game couldn't calculate Physx fast enough, so you'd either drop frames, or the calcs would not be as accurate, depending on your settings). Nowadays, it's rare (if ever) that I run up against this.

The Windows x64 client was non-existent. One day (around about 0.24 I believe) - some enterprising people, figured out that you could run KSP on the Unity 4 x64 Windows client, but it was a hot mess. The devs then released an official Win64 client, with the caveat "it's buggy as hell". Many people did not read this last bit, complained that mods were not working properly (when it was Unity that wasn't working properly). mod makers got angry and basically stopped their mods from running on Win64.

Because we Windows players were stuck on 32 bit, we had a hard memory limit of about 3.7GB. This meant you had to limit the amount of mods you installed, because if you exceeded that, the game would crash. To make matters worse - the game had a bug where memory usage would increase every time you changed scenes. This meant that you were on a timer before you hit that limit, and the game crashed.

Wow - as I'm typing this, I find myself thinking "why on earth did you put up with all this" - I must REALLY like this game.

There's also the issue that Unity (4 or 5) does all physics calculations in single point (32 bit) math.  For most games this is irrelevant: this works out to something like 9 significant digits and since maximum possible graphics resolution is about 4000x4000, it never comes up.  KSP,  on the other hand, uses that math to cover everything from the forces acting on each strut to the movement of the planets.

You might hear people mention "the Kraken eating their ships".  Unless it was a post from several years back, it wasn't "the" Kraken.  Back then the origin used was either Kerbin (since KSP started there and only gradually added the rest of the solar system [and most likely due to how the bug manifested]) or Kerbol (which would make things easier once you added the rest of the planets).  In any event, what would happen was that thanks to the minute errors of the floating point numbers (because most of the ship's 9 digits were all the same, there was little room left to calculate ship's physics) things would either overlap or otherwise produce ship-destroying actions.  The Kraken had fed.

In the end, KSP now puts the ship at the origin of the floating point coordinates, so the ship parts get full resolution of their calculations.  Far off planetary masses hardly need any more resolution, and any ship further away than a few kilometers or so (the "physics bubble") are simply assumed to maintain their orbits (the "on rails" effect).  I'm sure all this makes life hard for the "real gravity mod" people, but Squad certainly preferred doing it to writing all the physics code from scratch, and doing it all in doubles.

To be honest, the bugs drive me away and the kerbals keep calling me back.  Simple trips to orbit are great, long drawn trips involving multiple launches that are blocked by bugs (like the system absolutely refusing to give me a maneuver node when I approach Duna) drive me back away.