Please, give the community KSP1's source code

[AtomicTech]

11 hours ago, WhatALovelyNick said:

Hey, we have more than a hundred cosmonauts, who've said "yes".

Cool.

happy_jebs_face.jpg

Wooo hoooo!!

[Lisias]

<please disregard - I misdiagnosed something>

 

 

Edited September 5, 2023 by Lisias
Whoops...

[Xt007]

Love the idea, but this decision is in the hands of people who have never played this game...so let's keep supporting it but expect that it will never happen.

[Lisias]

5 hours ago, Xt007 said:

Love the idea, but this decision is in the hands of people who have never played this game...so let's keep supporting it but expect that it will never happen.

That's the thing: I'm not willing to appeal to their kindness or extreme altruism (you can bet your cheeks I'm none of these neither).

We intend to demonstrate to them that Opening the Source may be a viable solution for their current problems (and they are many).

It's important to remember that Opening the Source involve only the Source - no assets, no lore, no Intellectual Property of any kind - except the Source Code.

We need more skilled eyes around here, and the most skilled I know are not willing to engage if using shady practices (considered piracy on this Forum) is the only way to accomplish that. I surely won't, by the way.

Spoiler

And, in the mean time, a few people already have access to such Source Code (by that shady practices at best, rumours about other means can be found on reddit), completely disregarding the Community or the users.

There's no Free Lunch - the idea is we scratch their itch, their scratch our itch, and all parties earn something in the process.

[AtomicTech]

9 hours ago, Lisias said:

That's the thing: I'm not willing to appeal to their kindness or extreme altruism (you can bet your cheeks I'm none of these neither).

We intend to demonstrate to them that Opening the Source may be a viable solution for their current problems (and they are many).

It's important to remember that Opening the Source involve only the Source - no assets, no lore, no Intellectual Property of any kind - except the Source Code.

We need more skilled eyes around here, and the most skilled I know are not willing to engage if using shady practices (considered piracy on this Forum) is the only way to accomplish that. I surely won't, by the way.

  Hide contents

And, in the mean time, a few people already have access to such Source Code (by that shady practices at best, rumours about other means can be found on reddit), completely disregarding the Community or the users.

There's no Free Lunch - the idea is we scratch their itch, their scratch our itch, and all parties earn something in the process.

Maybe we'll even get the community to do a complete overhaul of all of the models in stock! (A new something like restock but obviously not like that because we don't have the rights to it lol)

[Bej Kerman]

10 hours ago, Lisias said:

no assets, no lore, no Intellectual Property of any kind - except the Source Code.

The source isn't an IP?

[Lisias]

3 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

The source isn't an IP?

"no Intellectual Property of any kind - except the Source Code." it's my understanding that this phrase implies that the Source Code is an IP, the word "except" would be an, well, "exception" meaning that only the Source Code would be the only IP those some rights would be granted.

"no Intellectual Property of any kind - but the Source Code." would sound better? Both phrases translates exactly the same to PT-BR, so I really can't tell the difference.

BUT… If you want to discuss Open Source philosophy… Yes, Open Source is Intellectual Property, and that's the reason we need CopyLeft licenses to protect it.

Your garden is not less your property if you decide to let your neighbourhood' kids play on it (granting them a "license" to play on it) - you can even impose conditions in which they can do it, as demanding they fix things that get broken and/or clean up the place before the end of the day, or you would revoke their "license" to use the place.

 

4 hours ago, AtomicTech said:

Maybe we'll even get the community to do a complete overhaul of all of the models in stock! (A new something like restock but obviously not like that because we don't have the rights to it lol)

Such "license" was already granted to us!

Sometimes I toy with the idea on "perverting" the KSP's Look and Feel to look as a late 90's MS-DOS game, with Gourad Shading et all.  

But we are digressing - assets are out of scope of our pledge (and we already have the Add'Ons to provide new assets anyway, we already have such legal permission!)

Edited September 6, 2023 by Lisias
Brute force post merging

[Bej Kerman]

55 minutes ago, Lisias said:

4 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

The source isn't an IP?

"no Intellectual Property of any kind - except the Source Code." it's my understanding that this phrase implies that the Source Code is an IP, the word "except" would be an, well, "exception" meaning that only the Source Code would be the only IP those some rights would be granted.

"no Intellectual Property of any kind - but the Source Code." would sound better? Both phrases translates exactly the same to PT-BR, so I really can't tell the difference.

BUT… If you want to discuss Open Source philosophy… Yes, Open Source is Intellectual Property, and that's the reason we need CopyLeft licenses to protect it.

Your garden is not less your property if you decide to let your neighbourhood' kids play on it (granting them a "license" to play on it) - you can even impose conditions in which they can do it, as demanding they fix things that get broken and/or clean up the place before the end of the day, or you would revoke their "license" to use the place.

If Squad gives up the source code, why not the assets? The source code is the meat of the deal, the assets hardly took much work compared to the time spent making the game. Why not ask for the entire game?

[Lisias]

On 9/6/2023 at 4:51 PM, Bej Kerman said:

If Squad gives up the source code, why not the assets? The source code is the meat of the deal, the assets hardly took much work compared to the time spent making the game. Why not ask for the entire game?

Because the assets is what make the game… The Game. And we are not pledging that the Game itself would be made freely available, we don't want to "steal" the game from them. 

The Source Code is just the nuts and bolts that ties the internal mechanics together. The difference between a Beetle and a Porsche is not the nuts and bolts they use, but on how they are used.

There's this weird thinking on the wild giving too much importance and value to the Source Code. The Source Code is just the means, the end is where the money is, everything else is just operational cost. Commercial enterprises tend to hide their Source Code not because the Source Code is valuable, but because the ideas expressed in the Source Code are valuable, and by reading the Source Code you would get the whole idea without effort (i.e, without spending money on trials and errors until the damned thing started to work).

On a thought experiment: if KSP would be completely rewritten from scratch using Unreal Engine, it would be the same Source Code? Not by a mile. But  KSP would be still KSP, the Kerbals would be still the Kerbals, and other than the absence of a few glitches from Unity (and the presence of some new ones from Unreal), the end user would hardly note any change.

Now, another thought experiment:

• there's no DRM on KSP, there's absolutely nothing preventing me (other than my sense of morals and my professional ethics, of course) to illegally distribute bootleg copies of KSP on the wild [edit: under a nickname or fake persona, obviously!]. What difference would make if by any reason I manage to recompile the whole thing fixing the bugs before illegally redistributing it?
  • Whoever had downloaded the illegal copy would just download another illegal copy of the damned thing.
  • No (further) harm, no (further) foul.
• on the other hand, if I have the rights to legally recompile KSP with the bugs fixed and legally distribute such binaries (and only the compiled binaries) to people that had legally bought KSP (and they have to buy the thing, because I would not redistribute any of the assets that make the game The Game), exactly where are the harm of this endeavour?
  • If only people that had bought the game would be able to use such derivative binaries, people that don't have the game would be enticed to buy the damned thing, or just no use it al all.
  • people that had downloaded a bootleg copy of the game would also have access to it, but they already choose to be on the dark side, nothing will change here.
  • Again, no harm, no foul. But people that had bought the game would have a better experience, and people that didn't would have an incentive to buy it.

Source Code is nothing but cement, bricks, nuts and bolts. The first time you build something incredible using a novel combination of such commodities may give such Source Code some intrinsic value due it's scarcity, but as soon as people out there figure out how it was made (or create new ways to accomplish the same thing), that value quickly erodes into oblivion.

KSP's Source Code worths very little right now, to tell you the true. Not only because there're shady ways to get it anyway (the shady practices I mention all the time), so anyone with the will and freely available tools and knowledge (and a bit of skills and free time) already have it - but because there're already alternatives to KSP on the wild, some of them with better implementations of some KSP's features.

What's still worthing something is the RIGHT to use this Source Code legally because there're still demand for KSP itself, but such demand is also eroding as the eternally unfixed bugs on KSP are making people enough fed up.

The World is evolving, the competition is not only catching up but surpassing KSP. What still remains valuable are the Cultural Phenomena KSP still are due the good memories of the past achievements.

But this will not last forever.

 

Edited September 8, 2023 by Lisias
some entertaining grammars made less entertaining.

[dok_377]

9 hours ago, Lisias said:

The World is evolving, the competition is not only catching up but surpassing KSP.

Genuinely curious about what you consider competition. As far as I know, there's only one game that does the same stuff as KSP, it's Juno, but even Juno can't compete with player numbers KSP gets even after all these years.  Maybe some other games like Spaceflight Simulator, but they are only 2D and don't have the same depth, no pun intended. Games like No Man's Sky and others are not competition, it's a completely different game and you can't even build your ships. There's no games that do stuff KSP does, and even if they do, they don't have the same character and soul.

Just remembered about Rocket Science, but this game is definitely not going to be competing with KSP any time soon. The player numbers are non existent, literally. It hit 30 players at launch in 2020, that's it, and right now it's 3 players per week at best.  

Edited September 7, 2023 by dok_377

[Bej Kerman]

3 hours ago, dok_377 said:

As far as I know, there's only one game that does the same stuff as KSP, it's Juno, but even Juno can't compete with player numbers KSP gets even after all these years.

There's also KSP 2 which will catch up sooner or later provided T2 makes the right decisions.

[Nazalassa]

5 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

There's also KSP 2 which will catch up sooner or later provided T2 makes the right decisions.

* ahem *

We cannot be certain about the future, we can only make hypothesis. Maybe it will, but maybe it won't. Only time will tell us the answer.

[Lisias]

On 9/7/2023 at 3:31 AM, dok_377 said:

Genuinely curious about what you consider competition. As far as I know, there's only one game that does the same stuff as KSP, it's Juno, but even Juno can't compete with player numbers KSP gets even after all these years.  Maybe some other games like Spaceflight Simulator, but they are only 2D and don't have the same depth, no pun intended. Games like No Man's Sky and others are not competition, it's a completely different game and you can't even build your ships. 

Well, "competition" is anyone that may "steal" your users from you, not necessarily by doing the same thing. If the user leaves you in favor of other game, then even Sky Rogue is a competitor because, hell, I'm using my free time playing Sky Rogue instead of KSP lately because I got fed up of finding and fixing bugs most of the time I decide to play KSP.

As a matter of fact, KSP it's also its own competitor. I finally managed to built a KSP installation with good enough performance and excellent stability (now that I worked around the worst bugs) using… KSP 1.4.3 (this is the first week this whole year I didn't fired Sky Rogue). Yes, it's missing a lot of features, but yes, it's also missing a lot of bugs - and I can live without the features (since most of them are available on add'ons, and I'm skilled enough to fork most of them and make them running on it).

So, if you are betting KSP is safe because there's no direct replacement yet for it, I'm afraid you are going to loose your money.

Starfield is going to lure players willing to do interstellar travels - and you can customize your ships.

No Man's Sky is a hell of a surviving and exploring game, and a decent open world adventure one - some of the things that some KSP players are asking for years.

Space Engineers are a hell of a fun game for builders - just forget about newtonian physics while travelling on space and you will be good. There's also this Empyrion game, but I'm still to find time to explore this one.

Elite First Enc… I mean, Dangerous is another hell of a open work rogue style game - combat, mining, survival, you name it. Oukey, no custom ships on this one.

Surviving Mars will surely attract people willing to manage colonies.

But, hey, all of these are high profile games. There're also the underdogs!

About 5 years ago, some dudes from Czech Republic pulled a game called Planet Nomads from their hats. Hell of a game, very decent survival and building game. I spent a couple years playing it instead of KSP, and just stopped because I noticed that this game share some of the Unity problems that KSP has, that were mitigated exactly the same way, and then I caught myself writing tools to make my life easier on the game… And then I realised that, hell, I don't need another KSP in my life (and then I bought Sky Rogue!!  ) This freaking game is not half of what KSP provides, but the other half is fun enough. Imagine a KSP where you can modify the terrain and build shelter with sparing parts and still need to survive (including hunting the local fauna). Kiss baby bye-by to newtonian physics, though - this game literally gave the finger to Sir Isaac Newton.  

Other interesting game that can lure some of the current KSP players is this new kid, EarthX - it appears to be more focused on the managerial aspect of Space Exploration, but I only discovered it this week and didn't bought it yet. (they directly support Linux and MacOS! #hurray!!!)

And the list goes on. Once people decide to ditch KSP, they will ditch KSP for any other game (or games) that gives them whatever they were seeking on KSP. Different people play KSP by different reasons, and this was one of the reasons that made KSP such a Cultural Phenomena: it gathered together different people that, otherwise, would not spend time together on the same place.

About Juno… Boy, don't belittle these ones. I don't think they are doing everything rigth if they really want to be a KSP alternative, but they are on the right track. But Squad was in the exactly same waters 10 years ago - there's nothing preventing them to do the same (other than a hell of a more fiercely competition nowadays…).

KSP goes belly up, Juno is where I'm going. This is another game that I'm playing now and then, by the way. Would probably be playing it right now had I didn't managed to stabilise my KSP 1.4.3 for "serious playing".

 

On 9/7/2023 at 7:17 AM, Bej Kerman said:

There's also KSP 2 which will catch up sooner or later provided T2 makes the right decisions.

I completely missed that one… Thanks God this wasn't a rock aiming my nose.

Yeah, KSP2 is a serious competitor for KSP¹ - I completely forgot they are/were maintained by different companies inside a Corporation… They are, indeed, competitors!

 

Edited September 8, 2023 by Lisias
I was tired and started to switch words without being aware! Fixed. (I got one flamefests this way… :P )

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

I completely forgot they are/were maintained by different companies inside a Corporation

Couldn't tell from how people actively wish KSP 2 to burn 

[dok_377]

43 minutes ago, Lisias said:

So, if you are betting KSP is safe because there's no direct replacement yet for it, I'm afraid you are going to loose your money.

I'm not betting on anything, could not care less. But I don't agree with the claim that games like No Man's Sky or Starfield are going to lure players away from KSP. These games can't be compared with KSP in my opinion, because they are doing completely different things from KSP. In KSP you design and manage your own missions, think about how to build crafts, how to fly them, and how to make it all work in relatevely realistic physics. Not just fly premade ships some places with no real orbital mechanics or physics in general. Starfield lets you customize (but not build from scratch with your own custom design) ships, sure, but you don't even need to think about placement, it all disregards physics completely and "just works". And flight pretty much does not exist, it's all just done through loading screens anyway, you can't even pilot the ship down to the surface manually. As for Juno, it is practically the same game as KSP and it existed for a while now but the majority of players prefer KSP still. I don't think this will suddenly just change overnight. But whatever, I'm not here to argue, just wanted to see your take on this, that's all. 

[Bej Kerman]

23 minutes ago, dok_377 said:

As for Juno, it is practically the same game as KSP and it existed for a while now

If Juno is the same as KSP 1, then KSP 2 overshot its initial goals

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, dok_377 said:

I'm not betting on anything, could not care less.

You care enough to use your time talking about it.  (this is a compliment)

 

2 hours ago, dok_377 said:

<…>These games can't be compared with KSP in my opinion, because they are doing completely different things from KSP. In KSP you design and manage your own missions, think about how to build crafts, how to fly them, and how to make it all work in relatevely realistic physics. <…>

That's the part of my argument I think you missed: people are leaving KSP not because they stopped loving it, but because they are tired of hating to love it.

What's driving people away are the unsolved bugs and the cavalier attitude about user's long term experience that is plaguing this game for years.

Most people never leaves Kerbins' sphere of influence, rare are the ones that reach Dune. Why? Because doing it is hard and time consuming as hell, and the last thing the user wants is to restart everything from scratch every time something is updated. But the user choose to update because besides potentially bringing new bugs, the update also fixes bugs that are peskying them and they can't take them anymore. So the user ends up caught on doing only minimalistic playing - what's, frankly, boring as time goes by.

Sooner or later the user gets tired of doing the same things all the time (fooling around Kerbin), but he's still afraid of engaging in long term missions (months of planning and executing) because they're fed up of being hit by mysterious bugs - that suddenly goes away, but there's no hope that for good and so the user just stops playing.

And I'm kindly ignoring the elephant in the room around here: a modding Scene that actually refuses to fix their own bugs too.

And then the user goes hunting something else to play, and they will adopt the game that gives them whatever they mostly liked on KSP, even that at expenses of losing the things they care a bit less.

Every single one of the games I mentioned gives you something that you have on KSP at expenses of some other things that they don't - so different people will prefer to migrate to different games.

 

2 hours ago, dok_377 said:

As for Juno, it is practically the same game as KSP and it existed for a while now but the majority of players prefer KSP still. I don't think this will suddenly just change overnight.

No, Juno is a completely different concept under similar mechanics. Juno is a "modelling dough" game, everything is procedural and you can build whatever you want. KSP is a LEGO game, you have a finite set of parts and try to build what you want from them.

Being able to fly the contraptions later is just a logical aftermath, and everything else is just support.

It may not look this way, but Juno is in a way better position to linger than KSP right now. Whatever Juno doesn't have yet, it can be implemented and better (like using the procedural parts as building blocks for "shelf parts" that need to be tested et all, and only then be useable - think on KSP's and Factorio's loving child), but whatever Juno does better, KSP is not following suit and, as it appears, never will.

You are right about things not changing overnight - but they are changing nevertheless. To where this is going, it's up to us to decide.

 

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Couldn't tell from how people actively wish KSP 2 to burn 

The 5 steps of Grieving/Acceptance.

• denial,
• anger,
• bargaining,
• depression and
• acceptance

KSP is going to have a hell of a long Grief as it appears.

 

Edited September 7, 2023 by Lisias
Tyops

[AtomicTech]

21 hours ago, Lisias said:

a modding Scene that actually refuses to fix their own bugs too.

I would partially argue against this; in the nature of this work, it's not uncommon that priorities can change and you no longer have time to update/develop/maintain mods.

[Lisias]

57 minutes ago, AtomicTech said:

I would partially argue against this; in the nature of this work, it's not uncommon that priorities can change and you no longer have time to update/develop/maintain mods.

No, I'm not talking about this. I would be the first on the list if I would!  

I will not derail the thread with unrelated details, but I was meaning exactly what I wrote: active refusal to fix bugs even after the diagnosis was confirmed and a fix was proposed and even implemented. The last one I ended up shoving the fix on Recall, what's a hell of deviation of its intended purpose (not to mention bringing to me yet more responsibility on the damned thing as I now virtually doubled my test cases for acceptance).

Edited September 8, 2023 by Lisias
Hit Save too soon.

[AtomicTech]

42 minutes ago, Lisias said:

No, I'm not talking about this. I would be the first on the list if I would!  

I will not derail the thread with unrelated details, but I was meaning exactly what I wrote: active refusal to fix bugs even after the diagnosis was confirmed and a fix was proposed and even implemented. The last one I ended up shoving the fix on Recall, what's a hell of deviation of its intended purpose (not to mention bringing to me yet more responsibility on the damned thing as I now virtually doubled my test cases for acceptance).

Thanks for the clarification

I'd agree that it's not great whenever pull requests that fix things are ignored; I guess that's maybe why the CC-BY-NC-SA or CC-BY-SA or CC-BY or MIT or many of the other licenses tend to be fairly popular. I know that I made heavy use of them when making AtomicTech Inc. Junkyards. Even cooler, because of this, someone's actually continuing Junkyards!

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, AtomicTech said:

Thanks for the clarification

I'd agree that it's not great whenever pull requests that fix things are ignored; I guess that's maybe why the CC-BY-NC-SA or CC-BY-SA or CC-BY or MIT or many of the other licenses tend to be fairly popular. I know that I made heavy use of them when making AtomicTech Inc. Junkyards. Even cooler, because of this, someone's actually continuing Junkyards!

EXACTLY!

And that's the real power of Open Source  - some maintainer are not doing a good job in your opinion? Anyone can do something about. Most will fail, usually, but we only need ONE success to have things back to rails (pun not intended).

Again, there're drawbacks too (there's no free lunch), but most of the time the cost-benefit is positive.

On a side note - be cautious about the CC-BY-NC-SA - the NC bites where you don't see it, it can be really counterproductive.

[Lisias]

To anyone still wondering why Open Source is needed, google about the ongoing Unity drama about the Unity Runtime.

I had warned months ago that we were on the verge of an Inflection Point here. It's not time to start to move?

[Nuke]

obviously id like the code release. but this isnt the golden age of gaming. when the source code for doom or freespace was released, the engine was developed in house, owned by the developer and could give it away at their leisure. if there was any 3rd party code or assets, used under license, then those had to be removed (as was the case with freespace's cutscene codec) resulting in code that wont compile out of the gate. communities could patch these holes (as was the case for freespace), but when your entire game engine is under license, its a completely different matter. 

[Lisias]

38 minutes ago, Nuke said:

obviously id like the code release. but this isnt the golden age of gaming. when the source code for doom or freespace was released, the engine was developed in house, owned by the developer and could give it away at their leisure. if there was any 3rd party code or assets, used under license, then those had to be removed (as was the case with freespace's cutscene codec) resulting in code that wont compile out of the gate. communities could patch these holes (as was the case for freespace), but when your entire game engine is under license, its a completely different matter. 

These situations is where opening the source import the most.

We need to get rid of the Unity Runtime. We will not be able to do such without Open Source.

It's **way** more feasible to code an abstraction layer and port KSP to other engine (probably Godot) than to write a complete Unity3D replacement.

There's no cheap solutions anymore. Now people will need to decide if they will pay the racketeers for the rest of their lives, or if they will pay to get rid of them only once. But they are going to pay, no matter what.

As Unity Technologies strengthen the squeezing, and strengthen the squeezing they will (see Oracle et all), Game Publishes and Developers will be forced to do the same with their users or they will go bankrupt. And so the same people that would be willing to help you to replace them will be left with the only option to replace you. 

[Nuke]

its easier to write your own game from scratch that to replace huge parts of the engine. 

Edited September 16, 2023 by Nuke