Performance with large part counts in EA

[Minmus Taster]

Obviously it's early access so it's bound to be less friendly to big vessels but I can't help but wonder if you'll be able to make bigger ships in the game early on. Also as more of a general question I have about KSP 2; what about debris? In the first game there was a very annoying point where the amount of junk in my save made it unplayable. This would be a crippling issue for the second game since you're inevitably going to create many times the junk you do in KSP 1

Edited December 5, 2022 by Minmus Taster

[pandaman]

54 minutes ago, Minmus Taster said:

Obviously it's early access so it's bound to be less friendly to big vessels but I can't help but wonder if you'll be able to make bigger ships in the game early on. Also as more of a general question I have about KSP 2; what about debris? In the first game there was a very annoying point where the amount of junk in my save made it unplayable. This would be a crippling issue for the second game since you're inevitably going to create many times the junk you do in KSP 1

There is in KSP1 a settings option to limit how much debris us allowed.  I would expect a similar feature in KSP2 

[jastrone]

1 hour ago, Minmus Taster said:

if you'll be able to make bigger ships in the game early on

well there will probably be bigger parts so bigger ships will be less laggy because they have less parts. ksp 2 devs also said they have focused on lag reduction and kraken attacs so it might even be better than ksp 1 the first early access release. one way they could do this is by calculating multiple parts as one. in ksp 1 every part can bend and is calculated individually. in ksp 2 they might make some parts stick together exactly because they simply dont need to move from eachother. this mainly aplies to surface attached parts but also other small parts. there are probably many other ways to make less lag too but i think ksp2 devs will be using this as well

[GigFiz]

1 hour ago, jastrone said:

well there will probably be bigger parts so bigger ships will be less laggy because they have less parts.

Well, this will certainly make it so that something that counts as a large ship now will have fewer parts, but it has also been shown that it will be possible to make massively bigger ships (much bigger VAB, orbital shipyards, etc). Interstellar ships are indicated to be on a scale far beyond anything we could make now. So that kinda puts things back right where they were, all things being equal.

However, all things are not equal: the issue is very much exacerbated by janky stuff in the KSP backend, which KSP2 will likely/hopefully be doing differently (and maybe being on a newer version of Unity will help? I can't answer that one). I actually had the same question on a different thread, and got a great reply from K^2:

"KSP handles fuel cross-feed in a very stupid way. To the point where it can be the main reason for abysmal performance of ships with very high part count. I haven't heard anything, but we're hoping Intercept fixed that in KSP2."

And presumably there will be other things that they are doing differently/more optimally as well, so it seems the likely ceiling for size and complexity we can go to before running into that level of lag will be drastically higher. Of course, this is KSP, and no matter how much higher the limit is, it will be immediately pushed to. If the limit ended up exponentially higher, that just means someone will try and build a megastructure or something (awesome, if it could be done (still probably not)).