Who Would Like a Real Scale, Real Solar System, Realism Overhaul, RP-1 Inspired Standalone Game Leveraging KSP 2 Tech?

[Rocketology]

KSP 1 has developed an incredible following over the last decade, has inspired many to seek an aerospace career, and has opened up a whole new level of enthusiasm for space exploration. And from this, a group of like minded people leveraged their talent to create one of the most prolific, awe inspiring, and challenging set of mods for KSP; RSS/ RO RP-1. That's Real Scale, Real Solar System, Realism Overhaul, and RP-1 is the career mode for it. The sheer amount of changes made to KSP via RSS/ RO RP-1 makes it an entirely different experience from stock KSP. Where stock KSP is an incredible balance between game and simulator, the RSS/ RO suite moves that needle deep into simulator territory, again, delivering a unique, and deeply satisfying experience (if you stick with and learn enough from it) that the stock game can't provide, even as good as the stock game is.

RSS/ RO mod suite really pushes the base game to it's limits (and tries in many ways to push past these) and is thus limited by it.  KSP 2 and the hype that it's already generating, reigniting the enthusiasm of current players, bringing back former players, and still growing with new players for KSP 1 - the release of KSP 2 is going to take all that to a whole new level. Which in turn, will lead to an even greater audience looking for more depth, challenge, and simulation of real space flight. Add to this the growing public interest in space flight in general inspired by what is happening with NASA and companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and more, the potential for a Real Scale, Real Solar System, RP-1 inspired stand alone simulator could not be better than right now.

PD please leverage the tech for KSP 2 into a stand alone Real Scale, Real Solar System simulator! (You can hold the Space Frogs for this one.)

Please like this post and share your most inspiring moments and screen shots from your RSS/ RO play throughs and maybe we can garner enough interest to get PD to deliver!

[MechBFP]

From my experience I expect either a standalone game along these lines, or a KSP 2 DLC along those lines (but with the Space Frogs ;)).

For the amount of time and money they spent, and the expertise they acquired, it seems simply illogical that they wouldn't leverage those existing assets and experience to make more money.

This however entirely depends on if KSP 2 is a financial success.

Edited March 4, 2021 by MechBFP

[Bej Kerman]

18 hours ago, MechBFP said:

For the amount of time and money they spent, and the expertise they acquired, it seems simply illogical that they wouldn't leverage those existing assets and experience to make more money.

Or let the modders do it for free. With more flexibility, I expect KSP 2 to react less badly than KSP 1 to mods.

Edited March 5, 2021 by Bej Kerman

[Spaceman.Spiff]

It will probably be a mod

It sounds like there won’t be much complexity to the stock game. 

[klesh]

I’d rather play Human Space Program than KSP2, so count me in.  

[K^2]

If you want something with more realism set in Sol, I would recommend just building it from scratch in a more suitable engine. Possibly even a custom one. If you find a team of modders/content developers who are willing to put in the work, I can set you up with an engine that will do the job.

[Dientus]

I'm thinking this would be a mod, like the RSS mod for ksp1. And with a genuine ringed planet planned for ksp2, I imagine Saturn will look and feel 100x better in ksp2.

[TLTay]

RSS/RO definitely is fun, but it's way to niche to make it financially viable. Stock KSP on the other hand is complex enough to be fun and challenging, but simple enough to have a broad audience that includes more casual players. I'm sure KSP2 will eventually get RO via mod...

Which makes me have to beg the devs: Please have modpack functionality!!!! We pretty much need it anyway for MP games anyway. Also, please can we have FAR and deadly reentry as a stock option?

[Rocketology]

5 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Or let the modders so it for free. With more flexibility, I expect KSP 2 to react less badly than KSP 1 to mods.

Major functionality shouldn't have to be put on the mod community, especially not so much work for free - and imagine what they could do with a game that already has the basics in it?

49 minutes ago, K^2 said:

If you want something with more realism set in Sol, I would recommend just building it from scratch in a more suitable engine. Possibly even a custom one. If you find a team of modders/content developers who are willing to put in the work, I can set you up with an engine that will do the job.

There really isn't a better game engine for this type of game, the Unity engine is way better than most give it credit for.  If your basis of opinion is KSP 1, you have to remember that Squad isn't a video game developer, they are an internet marketing company that made a game on the side with little to no experience making a game. So they literally Kerbaled together KSP, learning as they went along with lots of mistakes in the core code that can't be undone w/o re-writing from scratch, hence KSP 2.  Should look at how many games are built on the Unity engine, you'll likely really be surprised.
Are there better game engines for very specific aspects, yes, but at the expense that it can't do the others, specifically accommodating  a massive, game world that requires extreme precision in asset placement. A custom game engine, requires a massive amount of capital and time to develop, that doesn't even happen for a single AAA title unless they have plans to leverage it out for multitude of games.

11 minutes ago, TLTay said:

RSS/RO definitely is fun, but it's way to niche to make it financially viable. Stock KSP on the other hand is complex enough to be fun and challenging, but simple enough to have a broad audience that includes more casual players. I'm sure KSP2 will eventually get RO via mod...

Which makes me have to beg the devs: Please have modpack functionality!!!! We pretty much need it anyway for MP games anyway. Also, please can we have FAR and deadly reentry as a stock option?

RSS/ RO isn't "a mod" - it's an entire suite of mods that requires many people to develop and maintain. Again, imagine what mod authors could do with a stand alone game that has all the core functionality and tutorials already. And I think way more people have given RSS/ RO a go than you think, and that community has only continued to grow. It would also likely be a  much larger pool of players if you didn't have to go through the conversion process to even get started. And it is a conversion process, not just a quick mod install process. 

[K^2]

1 hour ago, Rocketology said:

If your basis of opinion is KSP 1

My basis is years of game development experience, most recently in charge of an engine team for an in-house engine for a major studio.

1 hour ago, Rocketology said:

There really isn't a better game engine for this type of game

Even Godot is a better engine for this type of game, because you can recompile the source, meaning you can swap out the physics and add native support for a lot of the CPU-hungry parts of the game. Don't get me wrong, it's possible to get to a much better performance even on Unity, but it's a very bad starting point. It made sense for KSP based on how Squad started out, but for KSP2 it's a huge handicap. The initial decision was clearly based on a promise to reuse a lot of assets and code to speed up development, which is now just a dead weight given the scope increase of the game. Worst part, it looks like Intercept is sticking GameObjects over ECS, possibly partly because of this, which means we're stuck with PhysX in KSP2, which is about the worst physics engine out there.

KSP is not a complicated game. What little is somewhat involved is entirely custom. Which means that a good engine for KSP-like game is one that provides you with a simple way to stream in terrain and planets, gives you a modern renderer, and has decent physics. Because every modern mainstream engine will give you the first two, it comes down to a physics engine. And in that regard, Unity is the only one of the bunch that's the wrong choice. It's literally the worst mainstream engine for KSP2 or similar game.

But you don't even need to go with a mainstream engine. There are smaller, lighter, little known engines that would be absolutely perfect for KSP2 precisely because they are so minimalistic.

Intercept is stuck with Unity for KSP2 because of past decisions. If you want to build something with more realism, however, starting with KSP2 as your foundation is just a bad call. There are plenty of options for building something that's going to be light weight, performant, and robust.

[MechBFP]

5 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Even Godot is a better engine for this type of game, because you can recompile the source, meaning you can swap out the physics and add native support for a lot of the CPU-hungry parts of the game.

You can get full access to the Unity source code too you know. It’s a simple license agreement with them.  And I have my suspicions Intercept did exactly that. 

Edited March 5, 2021 by MechBFP

[mcwaffles2003]

3 hours ago, K^2 said:

If you want something with more realism set in Sol, I would recommend just building it from scratch in a more suitable engine. Possibly even a custom one. If you find a team of modders/content developers who are willing to put in the work, I can set you up with an engine that will do the job.

What difference do you believe it would make and why would one be necessary? The stock game is already going to incorporate localized N-Body physics and it seems like a lot of the frame work necessary for RO/RP-1 will be there already (aside from aerodynamics)

[Rocketology]

1 minute ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

What difference do you believe it would make and why would one be necessary? The stock game is already going to incorporate localized N-Body physics and it seems like a lot of the frame work necessary for RO/RP-1 will be there already (aside from aerodynamics)

According to Nate Simpson, KSP 2 will not have native N-Body physics, just persistent rotation. N-Body physics is fun to mess with, but if you want to have comprehensive orbital infrastructure, it becomes overwhelmingly tedious with a quickness unless you could have some sort of automated station keeping system and it would need to not require as much background processing as Principia does.

[mcwaffles2003]

1 minute ago, Rocketology said:

According to Nate Simpson, KSP 2 will not have native N-Body physics, just persistent rotation. N-Body physics is fun to mess with, but if you want to have comprehensive orbital infrastructure, it becomes overwhelmingly tedious with a quickness unless you could have some sort of automated station keeping system and it would need to not require as much background processing as Principia does.

I recall in the audio interview that localized N-body physics was confirmed and confined to specific systems like rask/rusk where everything outside the SOI of the system will not be counted.

[Wubslin]

3 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

I recall in the audio interview that localized N-body physics was confirmed and confined to specific systems like rask/rusk where everything outside the SOI of the system will not be counted.

All we really know for certain is that Rask/Rusk has restricted three body.

[mcwaffles2003]

14 minutes ago, Wubslin said:

All we really know for certain is that Rask/Rusk has restricted three body.

Restricted 3 body is a specific case of N-body. Either way the foundation is there for expanding and it is no longer patched conics

[Wubslin]

1 minute ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Restricted 3 body is a specific case of N-body. Either way the foundation is there for expanding and it is no longer patched conics

It's a special case which happens to be far easier to implement, and solutions for approximating it might not generalize well. Just saying.

[K^2]

19 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

What difference do you believe it would make and why would one be necessary? The stock game is already going to incorporate localized N-Body physics and it seems like a lot of the frame work necessary for RO/RP-1 will be there already (aside from aerodynamics)

Eliminate Kraken all together with good physics system. Provide frameworks for procedural tanks, fairings, wings, etc right into the engine, which can then properly interact with aerodynamics sim. But most interestingly, planetary bodies that are correct to within a few meters based on data from NASA. And while pushing visual fidelity to fully match MSFS 20 is going to be a bit unrealistic for a small team, I can crank out a relatively simple system to render plausible forests and cities based on available imagery with relatively low effort.

There are parts of this that you could build out with mods, but planets alone are worth building a custom solution for if you really want something that looks good, and there just isn't a reason to stick to KSP2 framework. It doesn't provide you enough advantages, and it's a whole bunch of things you're going to have to fight.

[mcwaffles2003]

5 minutes ago, Wubslin said:

It's a special case which happens to be far easier to implement, and solutions for approximating it might not generalize well. Just saying.

I guess we will see when the game comes out. Though I doubt rask/rusk will be the only place something like this is implemented if they went through all the trouble of building another system besides patched conics and if a mod like principia was capable of working in KSP 1 then I think it's reasonable to hope for reasonable performance with something similar in KSP 2. I could just be very naïve though

[Jacke]

I personally wish Squad had gone with a proper real-scale planetary system for KSP, even if they made it a calque of the Solar System instead of an exact copy.  They reduced the space scale when the better way was to allow more scale of the time scale.

I wish KSP 2 would be a real-scale planetary system.

[jimmymcgoochie]

I can see both sides of the argument. On one hand, a dedicated “realistic” game could be made to optimise the game engines etc. for the larger scale and complexity of RP-2(?) without necessarily being limited by decisions made by the KSP developers, as RP-1/RO/RSS is by KSP, but that would require a tremendous amount of work that someone somewhere would have to do and most likely get paid for (plus the potential complication of trying to use someone else’s code, requiring some type of licensing agreement which would add to the cost); on the other hand just making it as either a mod pack or a single monolithic mod, possibly recycling some assets from RP-1/RO if practical, and running that in KSP2 would be the easier solution, though it would again have to play by the rules of the base game to a large extent and which would limit some of the features that could be added.

I for one would be content enough with just having KSP2 released as a finished, polished product with all the promised features, good performance even with high part counts and graphics settings and minimal bugs; RP-1 et al will still be there for KSP and I expect that RO2/RP-2 will be made as mods for KSP2 rather than making a completely standalone game for it.

[Starhelperdude]

3 hours ago, Jacke said:

I personally wish Squad had gone with a proper real-scale planetary system for KSP, even if they made it a calque of the Solar System instead of an exact copy.  They reduced the space scale when the better way was to allow more scale of the time scale.

I wish KSP 2 would be a real-scale planetary system.

for some people it is hard to launch a real scale atlas V in ksp, now imagine a newbie launching a proton into a IRL 300x300 orbit, heck, I can't even do it and I have around 2000 hours of ksp!

[Bej Kerman]

On 3/5/2021 at 4:31 AM, Jacke said:

I personally wish Squad had gone with a proper real-scale planetary system for KSP, even if they made it a calque of the Solar System instead of an exact copy.  They reduced the space scale when the better way was to allow more scale of the time scale.

I wish KSP 2 would be a real-scale planetary system.

You want to spend 5 times longer launching a single rocket for the same challenges? Go ahead, mod your game to how you see fit. [snip]

[Guest]

In the economic system we live in, the question is, would it be commercially viable? I don’t know, but the RSS/RO community appears to be a fairly small subset of the KSP community. It would be very cool, no doubt, but I’m not sure it would pay the bills.

On the other hand, there’s Microsoft Flight Simulator which is mega hardcore. Perhaps there’s a public there that would be ready to jump into this.

Edited March 5, 2021 by Guest

[Empiro]

16 hours ago, Rocketology said:

Major functionality shouldn't have to be put on the mod community, especially not so much work for free - and imagine what they could do with a game that already has the basics in it?

There really isn't a better game engine for this type of game, the Unity engine is way better than most give it credit for.  If your basis of opinion is KSP 1, you have to remember that Squad isn't a video game developer, they are an internet marketing company that made a game on the side with little to no experience making a game. So they literally Kerbaled together KSP, learning as they went along with lots of mistakes in the core code that can't be undone w/o re-writing from scratch, hence KSP 2.  Should look at how many games are built on the Unity engine, you'll likely really be surprised.
Are there better game engines for very specific aspects, yes, but at the expense that it can't do the others, specifically accommodating  a massive, game world that requires extreme precision in asset placement. A custom game engine, requires a massive amount of capital and time to develop, that doesn't even happen for a single AAA title unless they have plans to leverage it out for multitude of games.

RSS/ RO isn't "a mod" - it's an entire suite of mods that requires many people to develop and maintain. Again, imagine what mod authors could do with a stand alone game that has all the core functionality and tutorials already. And I think way more people have given RSS/ RO a go than you think, and that community has only continued to grow. It would also likely be a  much larger pool of players if you didn't have to go through the conversion process to even get started. And it is a conversion process, not just a quick mod install process. 

Unity is a great engine, but there have been a number of talks where the developers have talked about all the hacks they needed to put in to make KSP work.  I totally agree that it's not feasible for them to develop a custom engine for KSP2, though one can dream. I like the idea of RSS a ton, and I want to try it, but I've personally been kept away by the general wonkiness of getting all the mods to work together. I really hope that KSP2 is able to work around a lot of the limitations KSP1.