Worried about console versions on KSP2

[DunaManiac]

As you know the console version on KSP1 is a hot mess, with game breaking bugs and outdated versions, KSP Broken Enhanced Edition is terrible. I used to be a console player, i know what it is like to long for something when not knowing when (or if) it'll come. I am worried that this will become KSP2's console versions. I hope that star theory will give the console versions some love and try to keep it at more or less the same version, and not making KSP enjoyable. In fact, this is what KSP2 could become in general if there isn't enough good dev communication and  not acting like these versions and players don't exist.

[whitespacekilla]

Based on historical precedent from other games, this goal might do more to harm the PC version of KSP2 than improve the console version. I think the game is just too complicated for console but those complications are the things I love about the game.

[Leopard]

Personally having "endured" KSP 1 on Eggbox, my take on this is one word

Avoid

 

will be getting a PC in the near future for other reasons, will be upping its specification slightly and will run this on that most probably

[SpaceFace545]

On 8/28/2019 at 3:23 PM, whitespacekilla said:

Based on historical precedent from other games, this goal might do more to harm the PC version of KSP2 than improve the console version. I think the game is just too complicated for console but those complications are the things I love about the game.

you can just plug in a mouse and keyboard to the xbox

[linuxgurugamer]

Having spoken to the developers, their answer is this:

Star Theory is doing all the development on KSP-2.  An outside company is codeveloping the console versions at the same time is Star Theory is developing the pc version.  There are a few employees in Star Theory who are working on the console version.  They do recognize the difference between a computer and a console, which is why the console versions will not be released at the same time as the pc versions.  And they do play it on the console as well.

My take on this is that they recognize the mess that KSP on consoles is, and are doing their best to avoid the problems that happened.

[Snark]

On 8/28/2019 at 12:16 PM, DunaManiac said:

As you know the console version on KSP1 is a hot mess, with game breaking bugs and outdated versions, KSP Broken Enhanced Edition is terrible. I used to be a console player, i know what it is like to long for something when not knowing when (or if) it'll come. I am worried that this will become KSP2's console versions. I hope that star theory will give the console versions some love and try to keep it at more or less the same version, and not making KSP enjoyable. In fact, this is what KSP2 could become in general if there isn't enough good dev communication and  not acting like these versions and players don't exist.

Absolutely a valid concern, but +1 to this:

2 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

My take on this is that they recognize the mess that KSP on consoles is, and are doing their best to avoid the problems that happened.

We specifically asked them about consoles, and it's clear that they're giving console considerably more love this time around.  No guarantees about feature set or how it will work or when it will be available or that sort of thing-- there are challenges in hopping platforms.  But it's clear that they're paying it attention from the get-go, and it's not being treated as a sort of "afterthought" the way it was in KSP 1.

TL;DR:  Don't know what the console story will actually be, exactly, but it ought to be considerably better than KSP 1.

[Leopard]

7 hours ago, SpaceFace545 said:

you can just plug in a mouse and keyboard to the xbox

and then discover that you can't use them unless games are specifically written to use them

[TokiGlassBlower]

Has anybody? Heard anything about KSP2 for consoles since the last post in this thread 2.5 years ago? I'm interested since I just started playing KSP1 about 5 weeks ago and am having allot of freezing and crashing issues, more than any other game I've ever played on any console and I started playing on consoles in 1977 cha cha cha........ (one more post and I'm free)

[Ahres]

23 hours ago, TokiGlassBlower said:

Has anybody? Heard anything about KSP2 for consoles since the last post in this thread 2.5 years ago? I'm interested since I just started playing KSP1 about 5 weeks ago and am having allot of freezing and crashing issues, more than any other game I've ever played on any console and I started playing on consoles in 1977 cha cha cha........ (one more post and I'm free)

[darthgently]

On 9/1/2019 at 12:16 PM, Snark said:

Absolutely a valid concern, but +1 to this:

We specifically asked them about consoles, and it's clear that they're giving console considerably more love this time around.  No guarantees about feature set or how it will work or when it will be available or that sort of thing-- there are challenges in hopping platforms.  But it's clear that they're paying it attention from the get-go, and it's not being treated as a sort of "afterthought" the way it was in KSP 1.

TL;DR:  Don't know what the console story will actually be, exactly, but it ought to be considerably better than KSP 1.

Who knows for sure until the beans are spilled but given the split in teams it looks like they are seeing the console products as a parallel "sister" project that will not hold back the PC product but keep up as it technically can.  At least I hope so.  Does anyone know if KSP2 is to take advantage of multiple cores?  It is my understanding that the latest versions of Unity do allow the game to use more than one thread/process and Unity has the capability to spread those over multiple cores.  I could have that completely wrong though.  Anyway, most consoles have multiple cores now so maybe that will help shrink the gap between PC and console and allow quite a bit of shared code between the platforms which would help the console branch to "keep up".  Pure speculation

[Leopard]

"but it ought to be considerably better than KSP 1."

you would have to be going some for it to be worse than the mess that was the first KSP XBox version

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 3/15/2022 at 3:20 PM, darthgently said:

Who knows for sure until the beans are spilled but given the split in teams it looks like they are seeing the console products as a parallel "sister" project that will not hold back the PC product but keep up as it technically can.  At least I hope so.  Does anyone know if KSP2 is to take advantage of multiple cores?  It is my understanding that the latest versions of Unity do allow the game to use more than one thread/process and Unity has the capability to spread those over multiple cores.  I could have that completely wrong though.  Anyway, most consoles have multiple cores now so maybe that will help shrink the gap between PC and console and allow quite a bit of shared code between the platforms which would help the console branch to "keep up".  Pure speculation

Read their development blogs in full, they're still using rigid-body physics for craft. That means no multithreading, full stop.

They will work around this with their "physics lod" which will treat large collections of parts as a single entity if certain conditions are met. That alone will do wonders for performance.

The original Xbox and PS4, and even the  " enhanced" versions will never close the gap, they're using kavari APU with absolutely abysmal single thread performance. Even compared to the first i7 CPU you're looking at a 50% IPC deficit, and compared to Ryzen 3000 and modern Intel CPU it's over 100%

PS5 and Series X have a Ryzen 3000 CPU, so they will run KSP 2 just fine.

Everything else is going to be painful even with their physics lod

[darthgently]

14 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

Read their development blogs in full, they're still using rigid-body physics for craft. That means no multithreading, full stop.

They will work around this with their "physics lod" which will treat large collections of parts as a single entity if certain conditions are met. That alone will do wonders for performance.

The original Xbox and PS4, and even the  " enhanced" versions will never close the gap, they're using kavari APU with absolutely abysmal single thread performance. Even compared to the first i7 CPU you're looking at a 50% IPC deficit, and compared to Ryzen 3000 and modern Intel CPU it's over 100%

PS5 and Series X have a Ryzen 3000 CPU, so they will run KSP 2 just fine.

Everything else is going to be painful even with their physics lod

I don't know enough about the particulars to realize that using rigid-body physics would imply no multithreading.  I guess I just saw it as ultimately like a coarse FEA with the joints of the craft as the links in the FEA network or something and I vaguely remember FEA being parallelizable.  Anyway, thanks for the heads-up, I appreciate the detail

[Incarnation of Chaos]

2 minutes ago, darthgently said:

I don't know enough about the particulars to realize that using rigid-body physics would imply no multithreading.  I guess I just saw it as ultimately like a coarse FEA with the joints of the craft as the links in the FEA network or something and I vaguely remember FEA being parallelizable.  Anyway, thanks for the heads-up, I appreciate the detail

Yeah KSPs craft physics is way simpler than that lol

In theory you could use a particle system to represent the joints, and that's parallizable.

But that's not happening at this point in development, so they have to make sure physics lod works well.

[darthgently]

5 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

Yeah KSPs craft physics is way simpler than that lol

In theory you could use a particle system to represent the joints, and that's parallizable.

But that's not happening at this point in development, so they have to make sure physics lod works well.

I don't know enough about it.  But I see things like at  link below and have to wonder what the big deal is

https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1341&context=etd_projects

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 3/18/2022 at 9:21 PM, darthgently said:

I don't know enough about it.  But I see things like at  link below and have to wonder what the big deal is

https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1341&context=etd_projects

KSPs implementation of it requires that the next calculation have a value available from the previous one.

So essentially you can think of it like trying to solve a system of equations with two parallel threads.

If the first equation is "2x-4=256" (idk if this even is solvable, just making something for an example) 

And the second one is "X-3y= 64" then you cannot solve the second without first having the first to use as input.

So if you spawn two threads, you end up with either deadlock (second thread somehow executed first, cannot solve and just stops the entire system until you hard shutdown)

Or absolute gibberish like that somehow equaling negative 3 or 0.

You can use locks, semaphores and so on to force the computer to wait until the first one is solved, but in this specific case it would actually be slower than just using one thread.

So all of this to say basically I mispoke, there are ways to do multithreded rigid body simulations.

But the way KSP and KSP2 have implemented their specific rigid body solver is not able to be threaded.

And it never will be, since changing this literally means the entire game, all the objects,parts and potentially even the planets have to change with that.

So they're over 2-3 years in development, and changing this now would likely double that at least. And quite likely much more, because debugging multithreded software is one of the most f u n experiences a programmer can have.

Insidious, seemingly random bugs just because your code executed a function just a tiny bit early that's also incredibly hard to replicate reliably.

It honestly is an art lol

But anyway

That's what I get for talking in general statements I suppose. 

 

[MechBFP]

On 3/18/2022 at 2:20 PM, Incarnation of Chaos said:

Read their development blogs in full, they're still using rigid-body physics for craft. That means no multithreading, full stop.

That is also an extremely old post before the studio change, was it not? Frankly I would take anything said before or during that period with a grain of salt as what was said could have changed significantly since then, as we don’t know what exactly happened with the scope of the game since then. There will certainly still be limits to parallelism that they can achieve but they might have also re-designed how ships work where that isn’t as important. 

[darthgently]

6 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

KSPs implementation of it requires that the next calculation have a value available from the previous one.

So essentially you can think of it like trying to solve a system of equations with two parallel threads.

If the first equation is "2x-4=256" (idk if this even is solvable, just making something for an example) 

And the second one is "X-3y= 64" then you cannot solve the second without first having the first to use as input.

So if you spawn two threads, you end up with either deadlock (second thread somehow executed first, cannot solve and just stops the entire system until you hard shutdown)

Or absolute gibberish like that somehow equaling negative 3 or 0.

You can use locks, semaphores and so on to force the computer to wait until the first one is solved, but in this specific case it would actually be slower than just using one thread.

So all of this to say basically I mispoke, there are ways to do multithreded rigid body simulations.

But the way KSP and KSP2 have implemented their specific rigid body solver is not able to be threaded.

And it never will be, since changing this literally means the entire game, all the objects,parts and potentially even the planets have to change with that.

So they're over 2-3 years in development, and changing this now would likely double that at least. And quite likely much more, because debugging multithreded software is one of the most f u n experiences a programmer can have.

Insidious, seemingly random bugs just because your code executed a function just a tiny bit early that's also incredibly hard to replicate reliably.

It honestly is an art lol

But anyway

That's what I get for talking in general statements I suppose. 

 

Thank you for the details, I am educated about something I've wondered about for awhile.  I get it now (like sunshine in my brain)

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 3/22/2022 at 8:21 AM, MechBFP said:

That is also an extremely old post before the studio change, was it not? Frankly I would take anything said before or during that period with a grain of salt as what was said could have changed significantly since then, as we don’t know what exactly happened with the scope of the game since then. There will certainly still be limits to parallelism that they can achieve but they might have also re-designed how ships work where that isn’t as important. 

They already had playable builds by then, even if they weren't stable or entirely representative of the current game physics is something that you implement from the beginning.

I seriously doubt they have any additional physics optimizations beyond their physics lod, otherwise we'd have a dev blog or three about them.

But that's still huge, since their implementation scales poorly with the number of elements.

Being able to treat 300 fuel tanks as one for most of the crafts life is still huge.

On 3/22/2022 at 10:30 AM, darthgently said:

Thank you for the details, I am educated about something I've wondered about for awhile.  I get it now (like sunshine in my brain)

Note my explanation isn't perfect and I'm sure I got some elements wrong, but I'm glad I could help.

[Xenon575]

I have a kind of stupid question but will ksp 2 be on last gen consoles (PS4 and Xbox) or are they just not powerful enough and the game will run like a slideshow 

[TheOrbitalMechanic]

5 hours ago, Xenon575 said:

I have a kind of stupid question but will ksp 2 be on last gen consoles (PS4 and Xbox) or are they just not powerful enough and the game will run like a slideshow 

Not a stupid question at all! It was kind of an out-of-the-way detail, but KSP 2 was confirmed to be coming to both current and last-gen consoles in this post:

(Also, welcome to the forums!)

[Xenon575]

20 hours ago, TheOrbitalMechanic said:

Not a stupid question at all! It was kind of an out-of-the-way detail, but KSP 2 was confirmed to be coming to both current and last-gen consoles in this post:

(Also, welcome to the forums!)

thanks for the info im thinking about getting a ps5 (i have a ps4 now) but didnt know if i could but this confirms that i dont need to worry about not being able to play ksp2

[t_v]

Another note- what about cross play? I really hope this is implemented, but what sort of barriers are there to cross play between consoles and PC?

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 3/26/2022 at 5:15 PM, t_v said:

Another note- what about cross play? I really hope this is implemented, but what sort of barriers are there to cross play between consoles and PC?

None really beyond the normal pain of keeping track of two separate computers across the world and synchronizing things between them.

But all of this would've already been solved for the PC multiplayer, so there's nothing unique about console cross play besides getting Sony and Microsoft's blessing to allow them on their networks.

[SciMan]

Really the most significant barriers to cross-play are the corporations that produce the consoles. PC and Linux and Mac (if Mac is supported) will likely get crossplay relatively soon after launch in the worst case, if that's not just a feature available at launch.

Crossplay between Playstation and Xbox is going to be the hardest sell for the KSP developers, because you have to sell that idea to Sony and Microsoft, two companies that are in fact competing for market share of the console market. Those two corporations think that if a game doesn't have crossplay, players will be forced to buy a console from them if they want to play with their friends that don't have the same console they have. However, the far more likely result for KSP 2 at least is that those friends just remain unable to play with each other forever, because KSP 2 is not one of those games that sells consoles. Because both Sony and Microsoft know that KSP is not the kind of game that sells consoles like that, they're likely not going to be willing to take the extra effort to support KSP 2 in a way that allows crossplay.

However, crossplay between Xbox and PC is another matter entirely, and it's something that Microsoft is likely extremely interested in, since Microsoft sells both the Windows OS (that most gaming PC's use) and the Xbox game console. As an example that proves this point, take a look at the newest Halo game. It's the first NEW Halo game that has released simultaneously on both Xbox and PC on launch day. Having crossplay between Windows PC's and Xbox consoles in that case means that the games will have a longer lifespan on the Microsoft consoles (and Windows PCs), because it makes the number of players you can choose to play with larger. At the end of the day that means Microsoft makes more money.

Now, the oddball one that I can't predict is crossplay between Playstation and PC. Just like with Playstation and Xbox, Sony and Microsoft are competitors. However, the fact that Linux and Mac PC's would also be able to crossplay in that case might change the equation slightly (not much, since the vast majority of PC's in the world run Windows, but it's not zero so it can't be totally ignored).
It's not like Sony will mandate that only Linux and Mac PC's have the ability to cross-play with Playstation consoles, that would be a rather unreasonable request that would be denied immediately, and both parties (the KSP 2 developers and Sony) know that.

EDIT: On the other hand, I was not aware of the fact that KSP 2 is coming to PREVIOUS gen consoles. I hope that's not a mistake that gets retracted like what happened with Cyberpunk 2077, because KSP is going to be an extremely computationally demanding game (for entirely different reasons (physics vs graphics), but the overall load is probably in fact greater than CP2077's total computational load).
Personally, I hope that means that the KSP 2 developers are forced to optimize KSP 2 even more, rather than cutting content and/or features to make it "fit" the PS4 and Xbox One (consoles that are rapidly approaching the 10 year mark of age, and if you know how slow a 10 year old PC is, just imagine a (weaker) 10 year old gaming console).
It would surprise me a lot if KSP 2 was coming to the "basic" PS4 and/or Xbox One, instead I'm pretty convinced that it's coming to the "PS4 Pro and Xbox One S" only, as they have better hardware.

Edited April 7, 2022 by SciMan
Slight concern about KSP 2 coming to previous-gen consoles