Is there a way to disable the physics calculation in KSP?

[buguniao]

I think most of the players have met a problem: when you create something that is used for displaying and filming, the framerate will drop below 5 due to the physics calculation, and sometimes crafts will explode during the filming process leaving a stuck KSP on my computer. If the physics calculation can be temporarily shut down, things will get way better. Are there any mods that can achieve this purpose?

[pincushionman]

Hack gravity in the debug menu?

...you may also want to look and see if there's some kind of out-of-game viewer in Tools and Applications that might serve your purposes better than that, even if it does work.

Edited May 3, 2019 by pincushionman

[buguniao]

1 hour ago, pincushionman said:

Hack gravity in the debug menu?

...you may also want to look and see if there's some kind of out-of-game viewer in Tools and Applications that might serve your purposes better than that, even if it does work.

well... hack the gravity won't shut down the physics calculation; it only closes the gravity. Therefore huge crafts will still explode when launching them.

Also, I've been looking for additional software that can load the craft file, but I find none. C4D can add the parts into it, but i dont think it can load the craft file.

[The Aziz]

Timewarp turns off the physics, but then you can't control the vessel, so...

There is also this mysterious setting called delta physics per frame, you can change it so your game would feel like it's a bit in slow motion, (shouldn't matter if you're going to edit the recording) but should go smoother.

[swjr-swis]

You should look into 'part welding'. It makes multiple parts work as a single one, which means physics are only calculated for a limited number of parts on your craft.

[buguniao]

2 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

You should look into 'part welding'. It makes multiple parts work as a single one, which means physics are only calculated for a limited number of parts on your craft.

I tried this one, but the result is not satisfying. It turns out that the fairings cannot be welded.

6 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

There is also this mysterious setting called delta physics per frame, you can change it so your game would feel like it's a bit in slow motion, (shouldn't matter if you're going to edit the recording) but should go smoother.

Wow! I've never look at that before. I'll try this now

[Aeroboi]

Also know that any form of clipping causes more framerate issues, these clipped parts can be minor. Also, the amount of engines influences framerates a lot, so if your using a lot of vectors maybe mammoths is a better choice.

Not to break your game, I would want to agree that such a setting might be appropriate for you or anyone else.

But so far, all video's posted by other members had this issue.  IIRCbradlywhistance did the Eve stock prop SSTO and he required 14 hours of filming.
What you want to do is make sure your vessel flies good to begin with.

I advise to hyperedit test larger vessels methodically by creating one step by step while testing such vessels to make sure I don't make engineering mistakes.

What I always do for larger spaceplanes is first make the fuselage, cockpit, engines and wheels and then test gravity drops (to simulate fuselage and landing gear rigidity), if it is not good enough I try different autostrut settings, another root part or using different attachment methods to see how strong I can make my fuselage.
Then I do pitching tests by first attaching the rear horizontal/vertical stabiliser and trying different engines combinations for the best takeoff roll.
Then I attach the wings, if you need large wings it is best to place each segment one by one to the fuselage for best strength. That makes sure wings can hold up under stress much better. Just make sure they're spaced wide as they might clip.
Then I make sure the wing looks good enough, having more wings near the heavy dry mass section. That means a rear delta wing for rear engine space planes or a mid wing for craft with engines at the middle. Then I do high maneuvering tests to see if the wings hold up. Then I attach cargo and try a race to orbit.
If anything fails on the way up I go back to the editor, adjust anything that needs adjusting and go for a 2nd try, one that's usually succesful.

This way you make sure you don't forget a step and have a malfunctioning plane. If you intend to record it is your management to get the vessel working, hence it's why people are willing to showcase their designs.

Also, a faster graphics card makes faster recording also, make sure you have one.

Edited May 3, 2019 by Aeroboi

[buguniao]

5 hours ago, Aeroboi said:

Also know that any form of clipping causes more framerate issues, these clipped parts can be minor. Also, the amount of engines influences framerates a lot, so if your using a lot of vectors maybe mammoths is a better choice.

Not to break your game, I would want to agree that such a setting might be appropriate for you or anyone else.

But so far, all video's posted by other members had this issue.  IIRCbradlywhistance did the Eve stock prop SSTO and he required 14 hours of filming.
What you want to do is make sure your vessel flies good to begin with.

I advise to hyperedit test larger vessels methodically by creating one step by step while testing such vessels to make sure I don't make engineering mistakes.

What I always do for larger spaceplanes is first make the fuselage, cockpit, engines and wheels and then test gravity drops (to simulate fuselage and landing gear rigidity), if it is not good enough I try different autostrut settings, another root part or using different attachment methods to see how strong I can make my fuselage.
Then I do pitching tests by first attaching the rear horizontal/vertical stabiliser and trying different engines combinations for the best takeoff roll.
Then I attach the wings, if you need large wings it is best to place each segment one by one to the fuselage for best strength. That makes sure wings can hold up under stress much better. Just make sure they're spaced wide as they might clip.
Then I make sure the wing looks good enough, having more wings near the heavy dry mass section. That means a rear delta wing for rear engine space planes or a mid wing for craft with engines at the middle. Then I do high maneuvering tests to see if the wings hold up. Then I attach cargo and try a race to orbit.
If anything fails on the way up I go back to the editor, adjust anything that needs adjusting and go for a 2nd try, one that's usually succesful.

This way you make sure you don't forget a step and have a malfunctioning plane. If you intend to record it is your management to get the vessel working, hence it's why people are willing to showcase their designs.

Also, a faster graphics card makes faster recording also, make sure you have one.

Thanks for your detailed reply. It is a truly great method on filming crafts that require physics calculation and the ability to control the vessel, however I'm planning to film a display--no control required and no operation needed. The whole craft is about 7800 part, so it's impossible to make any maneuvers... So it is still the case: how can i banned the physics calculation? 

[ZooNamedGames]

I've seen a few mods that allow you to control how the physics is applied to each part, at least as to collisions. I don't recall the mod names, something toolkit I believe. It's on CKAN. That much I know.

As to welding and fairings- a suggestion would be to make everything below the fairing 1 part and everything inside the fairing another part. If there's staged sections, then make everything that'll stage off one part, the decoupler as it's own part and the core as it's own single part. You still won't end up with 1 part but it should still run vastly smoother than running it without welding.

Also another suggestion is to just ramp the video speed up. Without sound and UI elements, it's not really possible to tell how fast the game is running once you get the game rate up to 1:1 with game time.

Edited May 3, 2019 by ZooNamedGames

[Xurkitree]

Better Time Warp.

You can use Slo-Mo physics warp to slow down ingame time to boost framerates and physics processing, then speed up the footage in post.

[buguniao]

22 hours ago, ZooNamedGames said:

something toolkit I believe

Well... there is no such kind of mod in CKAN... But still, thank you for your advice! Really appreciate

10 minutes ago, Xurkitree said:

Better Time Warp.

You can use Slo-Mo physics warp to slow down ingame time to boost framerates and physics processing, then speed up the footage in post.

This mod doesn't make my CPU and framerate feels better... still 0.5fps

[Xurkitree]

2 minutes ago, buguniao said:

Well... there is no such kind of mod in CKAN... But still, thank you for your advice! Really appreciate

This mod doesn't make my CPU and framerate feels better... still 0.5fps

its because you slowed down time dummy  the passage of time will slowdown - however the slowed down action will be smoother.

[buguniao]

4 minutes ago, Xurkitree said:

its because you slowed down time dummy  the passage of time will slowdown - however the slowed down action will be smoother.

maybe its because my craft is toooooo huge -- over 7700p

therefore its really hard to tell if things get smoother...

[Vanamonde]

Looks like you're asking for mods rather than suggesting a change to the stock game, and so the thread has been moved to Add-on Discussions.

[Claw]

On 5/2/2019 at 7:24 PM, buguniao said:

when you create something that is used for displaying and filming, the framerate will drop below 5 due to the physics calculation

Your actual goal isn't all that clear to me...you don't say exactly what you're doing with the creation. Though subsequent posts indicate launch. But then you later posted...

On 5/3/2019 at 8:15 AM, buguniao said:

no control required and no operation needed

So I'm not entirely sure what you're after. If you're only using the ship as a backdrop, then starting time warp will put the craft on rails and suspend part-to-part physics calculations. Also, if you aren't maneuvering the ship, many of the physics calculations are dropped.

 

I'm not super knowledgeable about mods available, but it would be possible to build a mod that can deactivate physics. It would essentially turn into a 1x time warp.

 

6 hours ago, buguniao said:

maybe its because my craft is toooooo huge -- over 7700p

7700 parts is a LOT of parts, plus you're trying to run recording software. It's entirely likely that your computer is simply having a hard time getting through that much work, even if there wasn't lot of physics burden.

 

On 5/3/2019 at 12:29 AM, The Aziz said:

There is also this mysterious setting called delta physics per frame

I don't think that's going to do what you want. I could explain it here, but I made an in depth post elsewhere on the forum. The bottom line is that it controls how many graphics frames to drop in order to send more CPU power to physics. The end result for the scenarios posted here is that the visual frame rate will go down.

 

On 5/3/2019 at 12:18 AM, buguniao said:

Also, I've been looking for additional software that can load the craft file, but I find none. C4D can add the parts into it, but i dont think it can load the craft file.

The craft file is unique to KSP. So unless someone has built an addon for a CAD program, then it's not going to be readable.

 

Sorry that this post doesn't contain an actual fix. If you could show or describe exactly what you're trying to film (ship sitting on launch pad, base landed on the Mun, huge space station in orbit) and what kind of maneuvers you are trying to do (launch, turn, land, etc) or not, that would be helpful in trying to find a short term solution if there's not a mod available.

[The Aziz]

59 minutes ago, Claw said:

 

I'm not super knowledgeable about mods available, but it would be possible to build a mod that can deactivate physics. It would essentially turn into a 1x time warp.

I think BetterTimeWarp had the ability to alter the warp scale to whatever you wanted (I was able to make physwarp up to x10 for ion burns, more was destroying my probes) - not sure if you can do that with regular on-rails-warp, as in change the second ▶ it to let's say 1.1, assuming the game would consider this as a warp with physics not calculated.

[buguniao]

3 hours ago, Claw said:

If you could show or describe exactly what you're trying to film (ship sitting on launch pad, base landed on the Mun, huge space station in orbit) and what kind of maneuvers you are trying to do (launch, turn, land, etc) or not, that would be helpful in trying to find a short term solution if there's not a mod available.

Thanks for the long reply. I'm really interested to make replicas in KSP using stock parts, so sometimes the craft will be extremely large. The recent craft I'm trying to film is the U.S.S. Enterprise which contains 7794 parts, and there is ABSOLUTELY no maneuver required. However, there are only 2-3 fps in the SPH and 0.5fps after launch... I've thought about this problem yesterday, and maybe it's not because of the physics calculation...? I'm not sure why it has such a low framerate. I'll upload my file on steam workshop in several days, and maybe someone can try this and help find out what is the actual problem.

plus: the imgur server seems to have a problem. I'll upload the picture later

3 hours ago, The Aziz said:

I think BetterTimeWarp had the ability to alter the warp scale to whatever you wanted (I was able to make physwarp up to x10 for ion burns, more was destroying my probes) - not sure if you can do that with regular on-rails-warp, as in change the second ▶ it to let's say 1.1, assuming the game would consider this as a warp with physics not calculated.

It turns out that my framerate is not getting better using this mod, therefore I'm really confused. Maybe it's not the physics calculation problem...

[Claw]

8 minutes ago, buguniao said:

The recent craft I'm trying to film is the U.S.S. Enterprise which contains 7794 parts

Having this many parts will be a drain, even without the physics. There are some extreme options that are available to try, assuming you're up for it (it might take some work, or perhaps I can whip up a quick mod to try it). I can't guarantee that it'll do what you want, but it could possibly improve the frame rate.

If you post your ship, I can give the mod path a try. Otherwise, if you're up for some manual labor on your end, I can try to give you an option to try.

 

Cheers

[buguniao]

10 minutes ago, Claw said:

Having this many parts will be a drain, even without the physics. There are some extreme options that are available to try, assuming you're up for it (it might take some work, or perhaps I can whip up a quick mod to try it). I can't guarantee that it'll do what you want, but it could possibly improve the frame rate.

If you post your ship, I can give the mod path a try. Otherwise, if you're up for some manual labor on your end, I can try to give you an option to try.

 

Cheers

Thats great! Thanks! I'm planning to release the craft within a few days, maybe next weekend, for there are still some small parts waiting to be adjusted. I'll inform you when I release the craft file.

[buguniao]

On 5/5/2019 at 9:43 AM, Claw said:

Having this many parts will be a drain, even without the physics. There are some extreme options that are available to try, assuming you're up for it (it might take some work, or perhaps I can whip up a quick mod to try it). I can't guarantee that it'll do what you want, but it could possibly improve the frame rate.

If you post your ship, I can give the mod path a try. Otherwise, if you're up for some manual labor on your end, I can try to give you an option to try.

 

Cheers

here's the craft