I really hope KSP 2 keeps support for older systems.

[Bej Kerman]

24 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

This may sound insensitive but I really hope they don't sacrifice ability to fluidly upgrade into the future for when this game is 5-10 years old just to make sure people with 10 yr old computers today don't need to upgrade.

Imagine if KSP was in 16 bit and had nothing to do with orbital mechanics to keep support for the SNES...

[The Aziz]

My biggest concern is that they have plans to release it on last generation of consoles. That's 7 year old hardware already.

I mean sure, there are some beautiful games today that I wouldn't expect to run on these consoles (such as: Horizon Zero Dawn) and sure ps4 may have their 8 core cpu, but you know... I don't want my console to whine whenever I launch the game (though I won't get it on console, pc master race etc)

There will be some sacrifices to make the game run on these, I'm sure.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

13 hours ago, harrisjosh2711 said:

There really is no competiton is why people are still coming to ksp. Though aged, its still fun. Consoles play a large part in this as well. Which leads to my next argument.

If you cant afford pc gaming, which is notoriously expensive, buy a console.

I really dont want to argue about it because i understand u guys point of view. Im just giving you mine. We are simply on opposite sides of the fence as my pc is ready for next gen gaming. Call it me being selfish if you wish. I paid alot of $$$ for my system. I expect games made in 2020 to use it.

Also, for those who cant buy new hardware, KSP1 is still in active development. If you want to play the newest games you're going to have to upgrade. It stinks, but it is reality.

Hey; no sweat. I actually really enjoyed this discussion, and i didn't expect it to come out of this thread of all places.

10 hours ago, The Aziz said:

My biggest concern is that they have plans to release it on last generation of consoles. That's 7 year old hardware already.

I mean sure, there are some beautiful games today that I wouldn't expect to run on these consoles (such as: Horizon Zero Dawn) and sure ps4 may have their 8 core cpu, but you know... I don't want my console to whine whenever I launch the game (though I won't get it on console, pc master race etc)

There will be some sacrifices to make the game run on these, I'm sure.

The biggest mistake any "Next-gen" game could make would be keeping compatibility with the previous generation of consoles; their CPU's are downright anemic and will impose a hard limit on AI, NPC count and any Scripting, Persistent Elements or Physics events. The lack of CPU grunt is one of the main reasons that this Console Generation hasn't seemed like much of a uplift in terms of Graphics or Game Design despite going from 256/512MB of RAM to 8GB and from GT 9800 level graphics to HD 7870 level graphics, these CPU's were such a massive bottleneck that despite the memory and GPU grunt being on tap the CPUs just couldn't deliver. This is also a big reason why FPS stayed within the 30FPS range, since the lower IPC means that higher FPS is much more difficult to output with reasonable frametimes unless you have a disproportionately powerful GPU (The approach the "Enhanced" consoles used).

And for KSP especially where Physics is King; i sincerely hope they make a clean break from the Xbox One and PS4 with KSP2 and only target PC, Xbox Series X, PS5 and Linux.

[vossiewulf]

On 7/2/2020 at 10:56 PM, Incarnation of Chaos said:

They've stated in the past that KSP2 should run as good or better than KSP1 on similar hardware

That'd be a first for a top-class title. In other words, complete repurposed bovine waste. Game companies always tell some whoppers but that's a whopper that wouldn't fit in a long-bed truck. Besides the general increase in complexity, it won't ship anywhere near optimized, nothing does, there's always a time crunch at the end and only the very worst perf testing results will be addressed prior to release. The way the industry works, no game is nearly as good or as performant as it could be when it's released.

4 hours ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

The biggest mistake any "Next-gen" game could make would be keeping compatibility with the previous generation

This. No one ever won an award for a sequel that could run on hardware designed for the prequel. You win awards for more amazing glitzy and spiffy graphics and lots of new features with considerable depth. Just like with every new generation of games, unfortunately some people are left out in the cold with hardware that simply can't keep up. The good news in this case is KSP1 is still KSP1 and lots of fun to play with a pretty limitless set of achievable goals.

 

[Incarnation of Chaos]

2 minutes ago, vossiewulf said:

That'd be a first for a top-class title. In other words, complete repurposed bovine waste. Game companies always tell some whoppers but that's a whopper that wouldn't fit in a long-bed truck. Besides the general increase in complexity, it won't ship anywhere near optimized, nothing does, there's always a time crunch at the end and only the very worst perf testing results will be addressed prior to release. The way the industry works, no game is nearly as good or as performant as it could be when it's released.

Which i did hint i have my own doubts about personally, but KSP might be a unique case. KSP has quite a bit of inefficient code baked in from it's early development that slows it down severely, which KSP2 won't have to wrangle with. KSP2 is also on a newer version of Unity and is Natively DX11, which all come with performance boosts. That's not to mention the Physics LOD system they've repeatedly mentioned; which would reduce one of the largest bottlenecks in the game and increase performance in most (Not all) situations dramatically.

So while i don't truly expect that KSP2 will run flawlessly on a 10 year old craptop; at the same time the idea that it's going to require a supercomputer to run i find equally silly. They have a lot of areas to optimize and eek out performance where KSP just can't due to the fact it would break chains of dependencies that are years in the making. So i think people will be pleasantly surprised with how KSP2 performs in the end.

But that's all hinging on the assumption that they do their jobs, and the game ships in a somewhat ready state. My biggest worry is that people will pressure them to release early, 2K will then apply that same pressure in kind and as a result the true performance and optimization gains won't be realized for 6 months or even indefinitely (Some things you just have to do right the first time....).

[magnemoe]

On 7/3/2020 at 9:47 PM, Aniruddh said:

I have a feeling ksp 2 will be more gpu intensive but less cpu intensive, it will also demand more memory. The ksp 2 devs have stated that they are optimising the game's physics which mostly reduces cpu usage; but they are adding clouds, better terrain and other graphics on which there is generally less to optimise; there are more textures (parts) in ksp 2 which have to be loaded into memory.

I'm planning to sell my old laptop and buy a new gaming pc when ksp 2 comes out as well.

Agree, better graphic and its more GPU intensive. Note that even if KSP2 run smoother the scale of the things we do will also go up with things as massive bases and starships. 

For other games, PS5 and next Xbox will come out within an year this will bump requirements for some games, its likely SSD will become mandatory down the line for one. 

[vossiewulf]

14 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Agree, better graphic and its more GPU intensive.

It's more like finally using the GPU, instead of doing nearly everything with the CPU like KSP1. I haven't seen anything so far in the released videos that says to me that KSP2 will push any recent video cards though. So the good news out of that proper rebalancing of processing responsibilities is that some people with older systems may be able to still run it well with just a graphics card upgrade, and even then they could get something a couple years old and inexpensive and it will still probably be plenty- no need to rush out and get an RTX2080, KSP2 wouldn't even make it break a sweat.

[K^2]

On 7/4/2020 at 10:09 PM, Incarnation of Chaos said:

The biggest mistake any "Next-gen" game could make would be keeping compatibility with the previous generation of consoles; their CPU's are downright anemic and will impose a hard limit on AI, NPC count and any Scripting, Persistent Elements or Physics events.

You're not wrong about current gen of console CPUs. But KSP is also the kind of game where it matters the least. There are basically two things the CPU is in charge of. Feeding the GPU with draw calls and running the game. The former can be pretty complex in general, depending on how busy your scene is, but even on the planets, there just isn't enough going on to give even the base model PS4/XB1 any difficulties. The fact that it's Unity is a significant overhead, as specialized engine could have taken better advantage of nuances of the game to make rendering even cheaper, but even with Unity, there just isn't enough complexity to make it a hard problem.

So we are left with the rest of the game. AI is only expensive if you have complex path finding or strategic gameplay. We can discard it right away. Even if KSP2 has some sort of AI ships, Total War it is not. You can do all necessary nav computations on a TI-83. The real sinks of performance are usually animation and scripting. The later almost exclusively due to poor implementation, but nonetheless, it is a fact we generally have to live with in game dev. Writing a scripting system that will keep your designers happy, prevent them from doing horrible things to your game, and at the same time runs at a reasonable pace requires an horde of developers. Because we have budgets and you just can't make designers write better scripts (we tried), sacrifices in performance in the name of simple, maintainable code base is how it goes. Fortunately, KSP is not the sort of game where you have five thousand behavior scripts running on every single component. All of the critical systems are hard-coded in C# and what little scripting you need for missions is cheap. Animation - I don't think I need to even talk about this. I'm sure the anim graph for that one kerbal you have running around the surface is actually quite impressive. But you're still animating just one character at a time. Even scaling up to a few in multiplayer is not breaking any CPU budgets.

On to the exciting bit. Physics! Normally, in most games, this is barely a speck. The reason is, you can't write a physics engine if you don't know what you're doing. You can write a script parser following a YouTube tutorial. You can write an A* path finder following the Wikipedia article. You can even write a crap renderer by following one of these "Make a Game" books. You aren't writing a physics engine if you don't have a few years in Classical Mechanics, Differential Equations, Numerical Methods, and a lot of CS courses (or equivalents!) to tie it all together into practical understanding of simulation. So you know which part of absolutely every game engine I've ever worked with is polished to an absolute perfection? No, actually, the math and vector libraries, but physics takes a close second. The simulation itself isn't always great, because some games have taken an oversimplified approach, but if you have a good quality simulation, it's usually one of the most performant parts of the engine as well. You just can't screw it up without screwing up the simulation itself and having absolutely everything explode instantly. Unity is built on top of nVidia's PhysX engine. I have many complaints about that one, but performance isn't one of them. That thing has a multi-body solver that is well optimized and it's paired with a very robust collision detection.

KSP has a bit more going on in terms of physics than most games, but it's still a pretty straight forward proposition. The absolute worst case is a ship ascending through atmosphere. You are on high part count, there are a whole bunch of active weld points acting as constraints on a multi-body solver, majority of the parts are generating aerodynamic forces, there are more potential intersections than ever to keep collision detection busy, and you might have physics warp enabled on top of it just to make things extra bad. You can throw enough parts at a simulation to make it a workout for any system. But the crux of it is that this won't get any worse in KSP2 compared to KSP. This is just something that the game has to deal with. And if KSP runs fine on a current gen console, there isn't really anything you can add to this in KSP2 that would require the next gen CPU power. Oh, sure, there will be a lot of advantages of running on next gen. You can throw in way more parts and still have a good framerate. A complex rocket on a large planetary base in KSP2 might give current gen of consoles a heart attack, while running perfectly fine on PS5 and SX. But this is something that PC gamers already have to deal with. If you want to build a giant monstrosity in KSP and have a smooth framerate, you better have a beefy PC to run it on. It's not really a reason not to allow PS4/XB1 players to even try.

There will be a whole bunch of other things. The GPU on next gen can handle a lot more, and that means it will require a lot more of the CPU attention. Multiplayer servers could have much higher player caps if the host is running it on a next gen console or beefy PC. There will be good reasons to play KSP2 on either a next gen console or a modern PC, I have no doubt. But none of it makes the base game fundamentally unplayable on PS4 or XB1. Or on essentially the same PC hardware that KSP currently runs on.

There could be any number of additional considerations going on in the background. I'm not going to pretend to have all the pieces of the puzzle. And overall, KSP2 can end up being way more CPU intensive than KSP, requiring a lot of people to upgrade. But saying it's unwise to try and get any next gen game to run on PS4 and XB1 is uniformed. KSP2 is a perfect example of a game where simultaneous release on current and next gen makes perfect sense as an attainable goal. It will sell way more units this way, and if you throw in a free next-gen upgrade on consoles, you might even be able to make deals with Microsoft and Sony to subsidize you somewhat, because it will help push next-gen sales down the line.