Show and Tell - Part Modules

[sturmhauke]

This means I can put a disco hall on my space station.

[Anth]

@Intercept Games

Also...Lights should be able to cast shadows off their own craft parts and not have the lights pass through the craft.

Definitely would prefer this to not happen in KSP2

 

Oh and by the way. Keep these posts coming. They are great!!

[SOXBLOX]

Awesome stuff!

So, will modules be a big part of the part modding experience? It sounds like they're a sort of "standard interface", if you will, between sets of variables and a whole part.

[sturmhauke]

1 hour ago, Anth12 said:

@Intercept Games

Also...Lights should be able to cast shadows off their own craft parts and not have the lights pass through the craft.

Definitely would prefer this to not happen in KSP2

I agree, but that also takes a lot of processing power. It's a tradeoff between performance and graphics quality. I think the ideal would be to make it a graphics setting, then people can choose which they want.

[Anth]

4 hours ago, sturmhauke said:

I think the ideal would be to make it a graphics setting, then people can choose which they want.

Agreed.

[boolybooly]

Delighted by the lights.

Attention to the player experience is welcome, in the little stories about how a part gets used.

I beta test a fair bit and construe its too easy for engineering to go ahead with tunnel vision on the task at hand and the player experience being created treated as an afterthought, which is the other pole, as it were, of game development and too important to be an afterthought. So its encouraging that the player experience is front and center of defining engineering objectives in KSP2.

[Dr. Kerbal]

Oh my. Your a genius. Lights on parts to see the ground and ships in the dark. 

Edited August 21, 2021 by Dr. Kerbal

[gussi111]

22 hours ago, herbal space program said:

Interesting  for me to learn that  they are trying to preserve so much of the way different parts performed in KSP1. I was not really expecting to be able to build the same ship I built in KSP1 and have it work the same in the new game. That seems to constrain a lot of the parameters of the new Kerbalverse significantly.

Shouldn't we get new and improved aerodynamics??

[TLTay]

4 hours ago, gussi111 said:

Shouldn't we get new and improved aerodynamics??

I sure hope so, but there's already a long and occasionally heated thread on that already. No official info released on aero yet.

[Lewie]

Neat!!

always a joy!

[RyanRising]

Hmm, pitching Mk1 Illuminators. "Hey, I've seen this one before! It's a classic!"

All joking aside, good to have some insight into how this is being handled. Looks like lights don't cast shadows here, based on the illumination of the launchpad, which... eh, whatever you need to do to get performance steady i guess. I'd like to echo Poodmund's desire to see that documentation publicized at some point. Better documentation leads to better mods, leads to a better game for simple players like me.

Edited August 23, 2021 by RyanRising

[AtomicTech]

Ooh! Thinking about parts, two questions:

1.) Are the redesigned parts from the later updates of KSP going to show up? (i.e. MK2 Lander Can, MK3 Command Pod, and the Double Bell Poodle.)

2.) Are we still going to be able to make oddly colored contraptions (like KSP Klassic) just using the default colors of the parts?

[chris-kerbal]

So part modules sounds like modding will still be possible like with KSP?
Not a modder myself, but loving them for all the hard work they put in and the gaming opportunities they created.

Maybe a show and tell how modding in KSP2 works and what you can "reuse" of old mods would be nice?

[sturmhauke]

I'll just say right now that if KSP2 isn't moddable, it's probably going to fail. Most long term players I know of (including myself) have heavily modded games.

[StarSlay3r]

6 hours ago, chris-kerbal said:

So part modules sounds like modding will still be possible like with KSP?
Not a modder myself, but loving them for all the hard work they put in and the gaming opportunities they created.

Yes, Kerbal Space Program 2 will be highly moddable. 

[AlamoVampire]

@KSPStar if possible can <fully understand if what I am about to ask is not ready for public consumption yet> you or anyone on the design team tell us what kind of fairings we will get in KSP2? My personal hope is aligned with them being more like the mod procedural fairings and nothing like the stock fairings of KSP1. I figured I would ask here since this thread is talking about parts. I am sorry if my question is out of bounds.

014208262021

[runner78]

Are the part modules implemented in a similar way to KSP1 or differently? The current implementation is unfortunately not the most efficient, and especially when mods increase part module count, it has a significant performance impact.

[SciMan]

On 8/20/2021 at 10:23 PM, sturmhauke said:

I agree, but that also takes a lot of processing power. It's a tradeoff between performance and graphics quality. I think the ideal would be to make it a graphics setting, then people can choose which they want.

Graphics option it is then, and guess what, the 2 newest generations of graphics cards (well, Nviida's at least, but AMD has a version of it in their newest cards too) have new tech in them designed to do EXACTLY THAT kind of thing, but almost entirely offloaded to the GPU (RTX aka Ray-tracing lighting).

And I just so happen to have an RTX 3070ti. However, I did pay entirely too much for it compared to MSRP. I would also much rather have had a plain-old 3070 or a 3080 because the 3070ti price/performance ratio is just not favorable.
Shortages being what they are tho, I bought what was available, because I was stuck on a GTX 970 and recent games were starting to chug quite noticeably. And now looking at graphics cards in general, prices have gone up again, so I'm glad i got mine when I did.

EDIT: I suppose I should say something about how part modules are implemented, since that's what this thread is about. Very well:

I do hope that part modules are as easy to change by the end-user or someone making a mod as they are in KSP, since in KSP they're just a plain-text .cfg file that anyone with a basic text editor can read/edit.
However, even better than that would be integrating the functionality of something that acts like the KSP Add-on "ModuleManager", but instead of it being a mod for KSP 2, it would be an integral part of the base game. I'm certain that that would be VERY MUCH appreciated by the modding community, as it seems like pretty much 3/4 of the mods published or updated for KSP these days list ModuleManager as a dependency simply because it makes manipulating the config files based on what other mods are installed and a bunch of other factors so much easier, especially when it comes to modifying the configs of parts that are part of the game itself and not from some mod.

On a side note, I use Notepad++ for editing KSP config files and making ModuleManager patches, because it's programmer-oriented and the config files of KSP are almost kind of a sort of programming language.
Notepad++ has this really neat ability to do syntax highlighting and other neat things for at least a few "real" common programming languages, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a patch for it that allows it to do that for KSP part configs. If anyone knows of such a patch, or it doesn't exist yet but someone is willing to create it, I'd love to know about it!

Edited September 2, 2021 by SciMan

[sturmhauke]

2 hours ago, SciMan said:

On a side note, I use Notepad++ for editing KSP config files and making ModuleManager patches, because it's programmer-oriented and the config files of KSP are almost kind of a sort of programming language.
Notepad++ has this really neat ability to do syntax highlighting and other neat things for at least a few "real" common programming languages, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a patch for it that allows it to do that for KSP part configs. If anyone knows of such a patch, or it doesn't exist yet but someone is willing to create it, I'd love to know about it!

KSP part files are more properly written in a markup language, not a programming language. The difference is they don't have any control logic, only key-value pairs. It's similar to JSON. On that note, it'd be nice is the configs actually were JSON, or at least another common notation like YAML or something.

ModuleManager files are a simple programming language though. You can control when your patch loads relative to specific mods, do some basic math, etc.

One thing I'd like to see is an integrated mod dependency manager, like the one that comes with Factorio. CKAN is fine for what it is, but there are frequent mismatches between their metadata and the mod owner's, if the mod owner even has anything to do with it. A proper official manager would help resolve things like 3 mods that depend on 3 different versions of another mod. It would require a bit more coding discipline on all sides, but I don't see that as a bad thing.

Oh and I think I've seen a few mods that have a Notepad++ syntax plugin in their bundles. I'll have to get back to you on that. Personally I prefer VSCode.

[gussi111]

I really wonder how the Mun will look like in KSP2, I hope it will look like irl.

[Gotmachine]

On 8/26/2021 at 12:40 AM, KSPStar said:

Yes, Kerbal Space Program 2 will be highly moddable.

So I guess it will have a custom clause in its EULA that actually allow modding to the full extent without risking legal pursuits or arbitrary hostile actions, contrary to the standard TakeTwo EULA that is currently in application for KSP 1 ?

[SciMan]

If you show an EULA to most lawyers in the US, they'll tell you it's basically unenforceable.

So I'm not scared off of modding a game by some EULA that says "blah blah blah we'll ban you blah blah blah pursue to the fullest extent of the law blah blah blah" because the "fullest extent of the law" in the US is basically "You can ban them from your platform and refuse to do business with them again, and that's about it" and I don't know of any company that will willingly prevent a potential customer from doing business with them.

I'm doubly protected from that kind of thing, because I have no intent of ever making any money at all off of any mods I ever make. I'd even be refusing donations that were donated to me because I made a certain mod. I can support myself thru the regular means, I don't need to make money off of my hobbies.

Then again, I'm not a lawyer myself, and some EULAs might be more enforceable than others, but no amount of contract language can prevent someone from doing what they want with whatever you're providing. That's down to the software itself, and look at Minecraft for how far that usually gets people. Minecraft wasn't "Designed" to be modded (unlike what KSP 2 will be), because it originally intentionally used obfuscated Javascript as its programming language, and yet it really didn't take long at all for all kinds of mods for that to pop up. Basically, if people want to mod your game, they're going to figure out how to do it unless you do something like make your game run entirely encrypted end-to-end like some of the newer anti-piracy software does. Two downsides to that, 1. It's expensive to buy and license that end-to-end encryption software when all you're using it for is a silly game, and 2. That same software usually makes the game run significantly worse than it would run unencrypted (look at reviews of some recent Ubisoft games for examples of that, people have managed to "crack" some of the older games and make them run unencrypted (with the software legally purchased via something like Steam of course), and they gain like 15 FPS without the DRM running in the background. I don't think a physics-heavy game like KSP 2 is going to have that kind of software for 3 reasons: 1. the developers likely don't have the budget to buy/license it. 2. The developers want the game to be able to run mods (as they themselves have said many times) and this would get in the way of that, and 3. They're spending a lot of effort trying to optimize the game to run better than KSP 1, and putting some performance-hindering DRM into the mix would probably un-do most of what they have done (or worse).

Besides, as soon as quantum computers become something you can just buy the services of, encryption and things like it are gonna go bye-bye, because you can ask a quantum computer to compute the correct result of "what's the encryption key for this algorithm and this data set" and with ONE instruction and execution cycle it will arrive at an answer. It's not like a regular computer that has to ask "is X the answer" "Is Y the answer" "Is Z the answer" in sequence, it basically asks "Is a superposition of X,Y,Z the answer", where XYZ can be every potential combination of digits used to make up that encryption key, and the quantum computer will spit out only the correct answer. I don't know if it will spit out all the answers if there are multiple correct choices tho, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.

[kAerospace]

How different will modding be in KSP2? Will there be an easy way to port KSP1 mods to KSP2 (with minor tweaks to the code, potentially)

[AtomicTech]

Nope kSpace, KSP 2 is going to be its own beast.

[GuessingEveryDay]

18 hours ago, kAerospace said:

How different will modding be in KSP2? Will there be an easy way to port KSP1 mods to KSP2 (with minor tweaks to the code, potentially)

28 minutes ago, AtomicTech said:

Nope kSpace, KSP 2 is going to be its own beast.

They'll still use the same Unity, so modders don't need to learn a new language, although most of them already do.