Better Timewarp

[Dr. Kerbal]

Ksp1 has one flaw, time warp. The time warp in KSP1 is always limited to 4x for physical time warp. On consoles, you cant do physical time warp unless in an atmosphere. Now this is problematic because this makes all players limit them selves to certain parts because some engines are really good but just are too slow and time warp is bad. Now since KSP2 is being made I would like the developers to know that KSP2 needs Better Time warp. All original KSP1 parts will be in KSP2, or what i heard. Then with nuclear engines and ion engines better time warp should be implemented. There should be tow types of time warp; "Auto Time warp and time warp". Time warp is just regular time warp with better physics time warp and time warp. Which means you can do physical time warp whenever from PC to consoles.  Now, auto-Time warp should be like auto time warp to transfer windows, muniver nodes, and etcetera. I think this ides should be in the game as i a KSP player always wanted Better Timewarp.

[Guest]

Not only they confirmed that we'll have better time warp and higher levels of it but also that we'll have the possibility to have burns going on in the background and a way to plan brachistochrone trajectories and months long burns with the maneuver tool.

[Kerminator K-100]

33 minutes ago, Dr. Kerbal said:

one flaw

Just the one?

[Hweiii]

KSP 1 time warp is completely linear, speed in eccentric orbits isn't. This can be a problem as when you are approaching periapsis your spacecraft speeds up rapidly and that has made me miss my maneuver
many times. The fix for this would be to make the timewarp non linear. So when you are approaching periapsis timewarp would automatically slow down. But yea, we definitely need a lot of timewarp improvements.

[Lewie]

4 hours ago, Master39 said:

Not only they confirmed that we'll have better time warp and higher levels of it but also that we'll have the possibility to have burns going on in the background and a way to plan brachistochrone trajectories and months long burns with the maneuver tool.

Bingo. It would be pure masochism to go interstellar with 4x warp. 

[mcwaffles2003]

33 minutes ago, Hweiii said:

KSP 1 time warp is completely linear

But it's exponential... it goes 1x, 5x, 10x, 50x, 100x,1000x,10000x, and 100000x

 

Edited October 12, 2020 by mcwaffles2003

[Incarnation of Chaos]

14 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

But it's exponential... it goes 1x, 5x, 10x, 50x, 100x,1000x,10000x, and 100000x

 

That's only for the  non-physics warp, physics warp which is limited to 4X and always available is a linear stepping from 1 to 4 as they describe.

[mcwaffles2003]

Just now, Incarnation of Chaos said:

That's only for the  non-physics warp, physics warp which is limited to 4X and always available is a linear stepping from 1 to 4 as they describe.

True, but 4x physical warp never mad me miss a maneuver at periapsis as in the statement I was referring to:

51 minutes ago, Hweiii said:

This can be a problem as when you are approaching periapsis your spacecraft speeds up rapidly and that has made me miss my maneuver many times.

Pretty sure they were talking about nonphysical timewarp.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

1 hour ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

True, but 4x physical warp never mad me miss a maneuver at periapsis as in the statement I was referring to:

Pretty sure they were talking about nonphysical timewarp.

Ah, that's what I get for replying while running errands. 

[IncongruousGoat]

Merits of the proposal aside, increasing physical time warp any further is likely impossible for technical reasons. "Regular" (non-physical) time warp can run the game at millions of times normal speed because it doesn't bother simulating most of the physics - it reduces the simulation to some basic power/thermal calculations, plus moving objects along fixed patched-conic trajectories. It's not really accelerating time, from a game physics perspective. Instead, what it does is more like freezing time, moving a whole bunch of stuff around, and then incrementing the in-game clock by some amount. Among other things, this means the game can dispense with doing all of the rigid-body physics it would otherwise have to do to simulate the currently loaded ship, which is why it's computationally feasible to have a time warp mechanic in the first place.

Physical time warp, on the other hand, is a literal acceleration of the in-game physics simulation. To achieve 4x time warp, the game has to either A: run its physics engine at 4x speed, or B: run its physics engine at some speed between 1 and 4x normal, and make up the difference by increasing the time step between iterations. Basically, to achieve 4x warp, the computer running KSP needs to either to 4x as much work as normal, or do somewhat less than 4x more work, but let the quality of the simulation suffer as a result. Given that KSP has trouble running the physics engine at 1x speed once part count gets above a certain point, it's hard to see how physics warp above 4x is doable on currently available hardware.