Please, give the community KSP1's source code

[Bej Kerman]

25 minutes ago, Great Liao said:

A bold claim. Evidence?

You've not been around for long but the community itself certainly lost its spark.

[Great Liao]

46 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

You've not been around for long but the community itself certainly lost its spark.

Ah.

[AtomicTech]

11 hours ago, Lisias said:

It's not my place to fingerpoint people, so I will not give you any concrete examples. But… There's a thing called Reverse Engineering that it's a way to analyse the binary code in order to reproduce the source code. It's also known as decompiling.

This practice is expressly not allowed by Forum Rules (see legal boundaries), as well the EULA. Now, this is not exactly illegal - but it's subject to legal complications in some cases, as well being illegal for sure in a few countries.

That said, it's blatantly clear that a lot of authors around here are relying on such practices. No ill intended, I'm absolutely sure, but this had set a precedent where a few authors decided to monetize the results of such practices (what I think may cause legal implications even on USA).

What the Devs can do about is to talk to their legal counsellors. The pertinent legislation is tricky enough to push me away from commenting about.

 

Baby steps. They already won a round, let's see what happens. Some youtubers are probing using Juno instead of KSP, and this is already another round won.

 

KSP¹ online players on Steam Charts are half from what it was early this year. SpaceDock total downloads ditto. CurseForge too.

All the metrics I have strongly suggest that, right now, there're half (or even less) players on KSP¹ than we had earlier this year, eroding a user base that was growing strongly since at least March, 2022.

Please note that such metrics are unable to give you the absolute number of players - we can only evaluate the numbers qualitatively, not quantitatively - i.e., I know for sure that we have half or less users than early this year, but I don't have the slightest idea about exactly how many they are or were.

 

— — POST EDIT — — 

Not all Reverse Engineering techniques are considered shady. One of such techniques is called Clean Room, and this one is legal on every place I had looked at. And it's what I do on KSP-Recall, if you go to its github you will see inumeorus issues full of experimentations trying to figure out how things behaved that way.

Thanks for the insight Lisias; I definitely noticed the lack of downloads in SpaceDock.

10 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

You've not been around for long but the community itself certainly lost its spark.

Bej, what's your interest in KSP's Source Code?

Are you some sort of stakeholder in KSP?

[adsii1970]

11 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

You've not been around for long but the community itself certainly lost its spark.

It depends on how you measure it. Interest in games comes and goes. Let me explain -

KSP still has a cult following, much the way Silent Hunter 5, SimCity 4, and Civilization IV have their cult following. There will always be those who keep the game alive long after official studio support for the game has ended or even after the original game's publisher, Maxis (SimCity 4), has ceased operations. It's the nature of the gaming industry. This is good news because KSP still has a lot of life left in it based on the lifespan of the legacy games.

Being a Gen Xer, I will also say that the interest is moving away from traditional gaming forum traffic and towards more "instant" social media platforms. We see this in the increased traffic on Discord, Twitchy, and other similar social media platforms where this can be facilitated. Gaming studios, where this new social media outreach is embraced and includes frequent YouTube videos and excellent communication between the community managers and the gaming community, are getting it right. Unfortunately, there are a lot of gaming communities stuck in the last two decades in their outreach and marketing strategies.

KSP remains my go-to game when I get a chance to play. 

[Lisias]

On 10/24/2023 at 10:57 AM, adsii1970 said:

It depends on how you measure it. Interest in games comes and goes.

Well… Concurrent players and active add'on authors usually are a good metric.

Yes, interest in games comes and goes, and when it happens with a decade long behemoth as KSP¹, it's not a surprise that this movement ends up with way more attention than common games.

KSP¹ is not merely a game. It's a cultural phenomena, like Doom - but beyond, because we have a whole new generation of highly skilled professionals crediting KSP¹ for their decision on pursuing such career. Not even Doom managed to get this.

 

On 10/24/2023 at 10:57 AM, adsii1970 said:

Being a Gen Xer, I will also say that the interest is moving away from traditional gaming forum traffic and towards more "instant" social media platforms. We see this in the increased traffic on Discord, Twitchy, and other similar social media platforms where this can be facilitated. Gaming studios, where this new social media outreach is embraced and includes frequent YouTube videos and excellent communication between the community managers and the gaming community, are getting it right. Unfortunately, there are a lot of gaming communities stuck in the last two decades in their outreach and marketing strategies.

You are failing to address exactly one of the main reasons KSP¹ managed to get such traction - long standing communities.

This new model of discardable communities driven by Discord et all just doesn't works for long standing cultural phenomenas, because Culture implies in memory, remembrances, and social media like Discords thrives on the exact opposite.

Quick paced, short living communities like Discord are good for marketing, no doubt. As a matter of fact, they are perfect for this.

But you don't do a success career on gaming only with marketing. You need to gather people around you that would add value to your content.

I don't see people with marvellous histories about rockets being mistakenly launched at "lunch time", or about how they knew someone that knew someone that was the driver for Armstrong and Aldrin on the pre Apollo times on Discord.

Pursuing only instant gratification, discardable communication channels may work for kids, but not for the people that made KSP¹ great in the past.

You need good content to thrive - so your choices are to have a huge budget to pay for such content, or to form a Community that will create such content for you. And you don't find good content creators on discardable communities with little to no memory.

— — POST EDIT — — 

As a matter of fact… I connect to Dsicord about twice a month at best, being the last time about 10 days ago. And I found a Community with 9908 members that created about 94 new posts about KSP2 in that time, and 55 about KSP1.

Really, the numbers for this old fashioned Forum looks way brighter, IMHO: we surpass these numbers here on a single hour on a good day.

 

Edited October 28, 2023 by Lisias
Tyops as usulla…

[adsii1970]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

You are failing to address exactly one of the main reasons KSP¹ managed to get such traction - long standing communities.

No, I did not. KSP¹ is just like other games I listed in my first post here:

3 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

KSP still has a cult following, much the way Silent Hunter 5, SimCity 4, and Civilization IV have their cult following.

Yes, there's a bit of a cult following of the original KSP, and there always will be. For many, it is the go-to game whenever you have a few minutes hours to kill. It still is for me - and my favorite version is not 1.12, but 1.3.0; when modded, it was the perfect game and still keeps my interest. Sure, I have 1.12 on my PC with all the DLCs and fully modded, but there was something about 1.3.0 that I could not let go of. And it is my love of that version of the game that keeps me playing and active in the community.

It is also why so many others are still active on this forum, the love of the game, and the community that has formed around it. Yes, just as there are folks who are cultish about their favorite comic book character, movie, or what-have-you, gamers can be cultish about their favorite game, and no matter how good KSP2 is, it will have great difficulty in topping the success of the original KSP. In fact, I'll make a prediction - people will be playing the original KSP long after we begin seeing hints at KSP3.

[Lisias]

5 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

No, I did not. KSP¹ is just like other games I listed in my first post here

Not, it's definitively not. Please prove me wrong by showing people openly and clearly crediting KSP¹ for they career choices.

How many games' characters are being sent to Space by Aerospace Companies?

KSP¹ is a game. But not only a game.

Trying to belittle it in favour of KSP2 will only belittle KSP2 itself.

[Bej Kerman]

48 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Not, it's definitively not. Please prove me wrong by showing people openly and clearly crediting KSP¹ for they career choices.

A lot of people credit their career choices to a lot of things and KSP 1 isn't the only thing ever in existence that's inspired careers.

48 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Trying to belittle it in favour of KSP2 will only belittle KSP2 itself.

A. They're not belittling it, this is just the state of the game.

B.  They literally said KSP 1 still has life in it, and they didn't even mention KSP 2, so I'm not quite sure why you're addressing an anti-KSP 1 attitude that doesn't exist in their responses.

48 minutes ago, Lisias said:

How many games' characters are being sent to Space by Aerospace Companies?

An endless number of publicity stunts like this have been pulled off in different industries and KSP 1 isn't special in this regard.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Bej Kerman

[Lisias]

19 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

A lot of people credit their career choices to a lot of things and KSP 1 isn't the only thing ever in existence that's inspired careers.

Well… We are listening.

 

19 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

A. They're not belittling it, this is just the state of the game.

With all the due respect to KSP2 developers, comparing 10 years of KSP¹ legacy to KSP2, right now, it's belittling it. Hopefully KSP2 will revert this position in the future but, right now… 

 

19 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

B.  They literally said KSP 1 still has life in it, and they didn't even mention KSP 2, so I'm not quite sure why you're addressing an anti-KSP 1 attitude that doesn't exist in their responses.

Because KSP2 had no place on this discussion, it's completely out of the scope of anything being said here and I completely failed to understand why it was brought to this discussion otherwise.

The alternative would be considering the post as derailing this thread, what I find pretty improbable due his role on this community, so I took the most logical conclusion I could think of.

 

19 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

An endless number of publicity stunts like this have been pulled off in different industries and KSP 1 isn't special in this regard.

I have word that not PD neither I.G. was involved on this one - it was organic and spontaneous, being the reason I brought this topic to the discussion!

 

Edited October 25, 2023 by Lisias
Kraken damned autocompletes…

[adsii1970]

4 hours ago, Lisias said:

Not, it's definitively not. Please prove me wrong by showing people openly and clearly crediting KSP¹ for they career choices.

Google can do that fairly quickly:
https://medium.com/@chrissteven743/the-simcity-effect-how-simcity-has-influenced-city-planning-and-engineering-for-me-ae1ee1b7adaa

That's one blog of a person influenced by SimCity ( there are nearly ten pages of results using Bing as the search engine). But within the same search results, just as we have seen KSP being used to teach spaceflight and physics in high school and university science classes, city simulator games are also being used for a parallel purpose.

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-cities-skylines-is-being-used-to-build-a-real-life-city-district/

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/blog/making-a-game-of-city-planning-students-explore-civil-engineering

People make career choices for several reasons, including being influenced by things they love to do - such as gaming. There are a lot of stories on this forum of those who have gone into aerospace engineering or have become pilots or other related fields because of KSP. Here are a few stories not on the forum and are relatively easy to find:

 

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

Google can do that fairly quickly:

Now, my turn:

Quote

This article examines how objects come to be considered as games by analyzing the process of ludicization (Genvo 2013) of the first SimCity (1989) videogame. This historical enquiry describes how this urban planning simulator went from being a ludic strangeness to an undeniable success in the context of the reconstruction of the videogame cultural industry (Adorno 1975) during the eighties.

https://nsp.lse.ac.uk/articles/121

SimCity is another cultural phenomena. It not only inspired people to pursue related careers, but was subject of many essays including on political organizations:

Quote

This research paper presents an analysis of the computer simulation, SimCity, used for an urban city planing class. The data were gathered by actual use of the simulation and an electronic mail network was employed to secure impressions from users of the simulation.

<…>

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED384539.pdf

Interesting paper this last one, it also criticises SimCity (we are talking the very first one) due the perceived weaknesses - some of them were worked out in the later releases, as I was informed.

I remember reading an article on some dead tree based magazine when younger, stating that some Towns in USA were actively encouraging public servants to play the game - of course, finding such article at this time was an impossible mission to me right now.  

This is what I call a Cultural Phenomena, and I'm not the only one stating that. 

Your links about KSP supports my thesis that KSP¹ is exactly the same, being used on Engineering Courses and even on NASA - not to mention the public in general.

2 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

People make career choices for several reasons, including being influenced by things they love to do - such as gaming. There are a lot of stories on this forum of those who have gone into aerospace engineering or have become pilots or other related fields because of KSP. 

Exactly. This is not just a game. Like SimCity, KSP¹ is a Cultural Phenomena. Something that cause changes on part of the Society.

It's the reason KSP2 got almost 12K concurrent users on Steam on day 1 - but also the reason that drove such numbers to 130 right now (or, worst, 40 at Oct 17, 2:00).

Spoiler

It's not wise to handle KSP¹as "it's just a game". It's way more than that - and exactly due that, it's important to preserve such legacy the best they can - because failing to do such will also bring heavily criticising over them - KSP2 would not had received such a terrible reception if KSP¹ would had been "just a game".

As a matter of fact, the same fate afflicted a posterior SimCity release at 2013, literally leading to the Maxis shutdown in 2015 - curiously, the same year in which Cities: Skylines was released taking its place on the market.

"All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again."

And, as an unexpected bonus to this Thread's very subject (and, so, closing the loop and making our discussion on topic):

Quote

SimCity Source Code Is Now Open

"Source code for SimCity has been released under the GPLv3. For legal reasons the open source version was renamed Micropolis, which was apparently the original working title. The OLPC will also be getting a SimCity branded version that has been QA'ed by Electronic Arts. Some very cool changes have been made by Don Hopkins, who updated and ported what is now Micropolis. (Here is an earlier Slashdot discussion kicked off by a submission Don made.) Among other things, it has been revamped from the original C to using C++ with Python. Here is the page linking all the various source code versions. Happy hacking!"

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/08/01/12/1846256/simcity-source-code-is-now-open

The thing was even ported to OLPC!

 

Edited October 25, 2023 by Lisias
Tyop! Surprised?

[AtomicTech]

14 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

Google can do that fairly quickly:
https://medium.com/@chrissteven743/the-simcity-effect-how-simcity-has-influenced-city-planning-and-engineering-for-me-ae1ee1b7adaa

That's one blog of a person influenced by SimCity ( there are nearly ten pages of results using Bing as the search engine). But within the same search results, just as we have seen KSP being used to teach spaceflight and physics in high school and university science classes, city simulator games are also being used for a parallel purpose.

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-cities-skylines-is-being-used-to-build-a-real-life-city-district/

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/blog/making-a-game-of-city-planning-students-explore-civil-engineering

People make career choices for several reasons, including being influenced by things they love to do - such as gaming. There are a lot of stories on this forum of those who have gone into aerospace engineering or have become pilots or other related fields because of KSP. Here are a few stories not on the forum and are relatively easy to find:

 

I love hearing these stories about the impact that KSP has had!

A bit of a personal note, KSP inspired me to not just go with the flow and pursue software engineering but instead hop on over to the aerospace engineering bandwagon which eventually lead to me wanting to purse electrical engineering.

[AtomicTech]

Woo hoo!! 152 supporters!

[zer0Kerbal]

On 10/25/2023 at 1:37 PM, AtomicTech said:

Woo hoo!! 152 supporters!

sadly, that is probably more than the number playing KSP+KSP2 on steam right now.

At least I am back to releasing updates 

[Nazalassa]

More!

[AtomicTech]

Awesome thumbnail from @Nazalassa!

[Nazalassa]

@AtomicTech the image location may change. It is heavily advised that you copy it somewhere else if you plan to use it.

[Gargamel]

I shall point out that we have rules against needless bumping and necros of threads.   If you have something substantive and contributive to post to the thread, that’s fine.    

[Lisias]

A new Success Case about Open Source came to my attention.

In 2002, Palm migrated their hugely successful (and bitterly missed) Palm OS from Dragonball (mobile 68k) to ARM, and released PalmOS 5 - by far, the version most used. Unfortunately, due a lot of bad bets, PalmSource (the Palm subsidiary responsible for developing and licensing PalmOS) ended up being acquired by a company called ACCESS - but since it didn't acquired the rights for the Palm brand, they renamed the thing to Garnet OS.

And the Source Code was never released, and so the eco system was locked down on emulations.

Until someone decided it was enough, and not only reversed engineered parts of the hardware support for the OS, but also reimplemented it to modern devices and made it Open Source! And now we have a proof of concept running on a Raspberry Pico.

Right now, it's possible to post PalmOS 5 (unofficially, as only the reverse engineered hardware support is now open source) to anything that supports ARMv4T or ARMv5T.

https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/repalm

https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27. rePalm

For the sake of completude, the sad history of how Palm ceased to be can be found here:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-inside-story-pre-postmortem

Spoiler

As a side note from a heavy Palm user, no other mobile device gave me the same productivity and connectivy my Palm Zire and later my Palm Lifedrive gave me. My brother was a huge fan of Palm Treo, by the way, and resisted Android for years until his last device died and he didn't managed to sourced another one as he was doing.

Modern mobile devices are shinny, faster, more capable - but terribly restricted by commercial interests that literally don't care about power users. I have tons of "power tools" that don't interact with each other (or just don't work at all - "Fake it until you make it"), it's a nightmare.

And other than a full size keyboard, nothing really replaced Graffiti. I could write a whole email almost as fast as I could hand write the message on pen and paper on my LifeDrive.

Open Source will find a way.

[Gargamel]

On 12/1/2023 at 8:42 AM, Gargamel said:

I shall point out that we have rules against needless bumping and necros of threads.   If you have something substantive and contributive to post to the thread, that’s fine.    

More content has been removed.    Please have something substantial to post when contributing.    This is not a chat thread.  

[AtomicTech]

Nice to see that we're up to 175 supporters!

With imagining an open-source KSP, we could actually attempt a mobile KSP (probably off of a much older version, like 1.0.0, that's been optimized as all get out)

[corbeau217]

On 10/26/2023 at 12:23 AM, AtomicTech said:

I love hearing these stories about the impact that KSP has had!

A bit of a personal note, KSP inspired me to not just go with the flow and pursue software engineering but instead hop on over to the aerospace engineering bandwagon which eventually lead to me wanting to purse electrical engineering.

oh my god, same thing with me! I started playing again because of for all mankind and now I've transfered degrees just so I can do more physics/aerospace units


While releasing the source would be neat, and very good for mod development and the community, it causes a lot of issues for future dlc options and also can cause issues for ksp2
the majority of their core code feels the same as it has since the days of HarvesteR, and I dont imagine much of the core has changed since (other than patching and mild refactoring to include new mechanics). I don't think it's a good business idea for them to release the source code, as I'm willing to put money on the modifications made to unity (to let them do the things ksp does) are very close to what was done for ksp2, and that with a bit of time you'd be able to make ksp1 into ksp2 just by porting over content. it'd also make DLCs pointless because then you could just install mods that do what the DLC does, and recompile the source to allow it

not to mention the various things already mentioned before about updates, and the potential for reputation damages from some of it, or the code bugs that have existed for a long time being pointed out (also i imagine the way they handle things may actually be rather unique yet simple, making it the "goods"/IP that take-two/private division wanted from ksp rather than the game as a whole, since then it makes it unique and hard to replicate. possibly something on the level of fast inverse square root used to perform the physics calculations within O(n log n)/constant time [which is probably also why the kraken exists bc it's probably using approximations to reduce the number of operations rather than it being just the standard float/double precision issues, which could be solved with seperating out the numerical storage into (0.0->1.0] and another for (0->UINT64_MAX) to keep the accuracy] )
 

[Nazalassa]

15 hours ago, corbeau217 said:

I don't think it's a good business idea for them to release the source code, as I'm willing to put money on the modifications made to unity (to let them do the things ksp does) are very close to what was done for ksp2, and that with a bit of time you'd be able to make ksp1 into ksp2 just by porting over content.

I have two possible interpretations for the passage I highlighted in bold; if it is the case, the fact that you are willing to financially support Unity (first possible interpretation) does not imply that you must buy KSP, I guess Unity has a "donations" button or the like.

In case you instead meant that you are willing to give the KSP team money so they can use Unity, be aware that the source code is not all of KSP. As it has been stated before in this thread, there also are the models, the configuration files, the asset bundles, etc., etc. that you will have to pay for; you can't play without those, so you'll still need to buy the game to be able to play. Therefore the KSP team will get money from people who (want to) play the game, and one usually doesn't look into something's source code if they do not use it.

 

15 hours ago, corbeau217 said:

it'd also make DLCs pointless because then you could just install mods that do what the DLC does, and recompile the source to allow it

Well, this happened in KSP, for example with Infernal Robotics, or KIS, or actually quite a lot of other mods, that offer new functionnality similar to those found in the DLCs. Did that stop people from buying the DLCs? I don't think so.

Besides, I think the source code of the DLCs should be released too, because they are somewhat "half-part" of the game. As I said above, asset bundles etc. may remain closed-source'd, which means we'll have to buy the DLC if we want to play with it.

When you say "you could just install mods that do what the DLC does, and recompile the source to allow it", do you mean that KSP's code does not allow mods to add, for example, robotic parts? Or inventory? Well Infernal Robotics and KIS (resp.) add that to the game. You don't need to recompile the game.
In a way, DLCs are just "special" mods: their creators had access to KSP's source code, so they could do stuff that work better, or is better integrated to the game.

 

15 hours ago, corbeau217 said:

which could be solved with seperating out the numerical storage into (0.0->1.0] and another for (0->UINT64_MAX) to keep the accuracy] )

Sadly, this would not work that much better. Numerical storage is always limited by memory. What exactle do you mean by "seperating out the numerical storage into (0.0->1.0] and another for (0->UINT64_MAX)"? Do you mean something like this?:

 SIGN    INTEGER PART       DECIMAL PART
+----+------------------+------------------+

That is actually (and roughly) how numbers are stored in computers nowadays; fixed-point numbers are like this, while floating-point numbers are written using scientific notation (but in base two), like (-1)^s * a * 2^b  and so the numbers s (the sign ), a (the mantissa ) and b (the exponent ) are stored as a number. Note that whatever way you represent numbers, you can not store more than 2ⁿ different values within n bits. If you want more precision, then you'll need to use more memory, and the Kraken knows how much KSP already uses.

[Lisias]

On 2/5/2024 at 11:49 AM, AtomicTech said:

Nice to see that we're up to 175 supporters!

176 now.

 

On 2/5/2024 at 11:49 AM, AtomicTech said:

With imagining an open-source KSP, we could actually attempt a mobile KSP (probably off of a much older version, like 1.0.0, that's been optimized as all get out)

With the mobile hardware we have nowadays, 1.3.1 will probably work fine. Perhaps even 1.4.3  (this thing runs fine on a MacMini i5 with a 288MB VRAM HD3000 GPU).

 

On 2/7/2024 at 8:46 PM, corbeau217 said:

While releasing the source would be neat, and very good for mod development and the community, it causes a lot of issues for future dlc options and also can cause issues for ksp2

For DLC, I think it's unlikely - even if they go full Open Source (it's not the only option), any fork that would break a DLC will most probably be abandoned by the users.

For KSP2, I can't say - I don't know this thing yet.

 

On 2/7/2024 at 8:46 PM, corbeau217 said:

the majority of their core code feels the same as it has since the days of HarvesteR, and I dont imagine much of the core has changed since (other than patching and mild refactoring to include new mechanics). I don't think it's a good business idea for them to release the source code,

The Source Code, frankly, doesn't worths too much at this time. Decompiling and bootleg source code are already on the wild to people that don't have problems on going shady. So, there's not too much to loose on this area - but still something to win, if done correctly.

 

On 2/7/2024 at 8:46 PM, corbeau217 said:

as I'm willing to put money on the modifications made to unity (to let them do the things ksp does) are very close to what was done for ksp2, and that with a bit of time you'd be able to make ksp1 into ksp2 just by porting over content. it'd also make DLCs pointless because then you could just install mods that do what the DLC does, and recompile the source to allow it

I don't think that putting money on shady modifications would be wise. The legislation that may allow such loop holes protects only non commercial exploitation. When money starts to walk, usually bullets start to fly.

 

On 2/7/2024 at 8:46 PM, corbeau217 said:

not to mention the various things already mentioned before about updates, and the potential for reputation damages from some of it, or the code bugs that have existed for a long time being pointed out (also i imagine the way they handle things may actually be rather unique yet simple,

The reputation damage is already done - seriously, we are still fixing KSP¹ bugs until nowadays. Having these bugs peskying the franchise forever, forcing it to rely on non exactly EULA and Forum Guidelines compliant 3rd party add'ons will not make thinks look good for sure.

AddIonally - people miaunderstand Source Code with IP. No one is asking (neither we want) rights over the IP - Kerbals, Lore, Assets, etc. No one is going to release a bootleg KSP with the Source Code (at least, not more that is already possible nowadays). The Source code is only the nuts and bolts that make things happen under the bonnet, and it's all what we are asking for.

 

On 2/7/2024 at 8:46 PM, corbeau217 said:

making it the "goods"/IP that take-two/private division wanted from ksp rather than the game as a whole, since then it makes it unique and hard to replicate. possibly something on the level of fast inverse square root used to perform the physics calculations within O(n log n)/constant time [which is probably also why the kraken exists bc it's probably using approximations to reduce the number of operations rather than it being just the standard float/double precision issues, which could be solved with seperating out the numerical storage into (0.0->1.0] and another for (0->UINT64_MAX) to keep the accuracy] )

This is not copyrightable.  Copyright protects implementations, not ideas. Patents would be needed to protect these ideas from being used by the competition.

There's nothing preventing anyone from reimplementing KSP's Cartoonish Physics Engine on any other game, as long it's done under a Clean Room Reverse Engineering way.

 

 

14 hours ago, Nazalassa said:

Sadly, this would not work that much better. Numerical storage is always limited by memory. What exactle do you mean by "seperating out the numerical storage into (0.0->1.0] and another for (0->UINT64_MAX)"? Do you mean something like this?:

 SIGN    INTEGER PART       DECIMAL PART
+----+------------------+------------------+

That is actually (and roughly) how numbers are stored in computers nowadays; fixed-point numbers are like this, while floating-point numbers are written using scientific notation (but in base two), like (-1)^s * a * 2^b  and so the numbers s (the sign ), a (the mantissa ) and b (the exponent ) are stored as a number. Note that whatever way you represent numbers, you can not store more than 2ⁿ different values within n bits. If you want more precision, then you'll need to use more memory, and the Kraken knows how much KSP already uses.

Interesting enough, the impact on memory would not be that much - you don't need to use doubles on everything, you can create local domains to be handled on floats and use doubles only when really needed - there're already some internal data using double internally anyway.

However… There's one point that would make a 100% shift to worth the memory tax: performance. When KSP was created in 32 bits, using floats was not only a no brainer, but also mandatory: we were using 32 bits CPUs. But then no one is using 32 bits anymore, and since then we are using floats on 64 bits hardware - what's worse. 64 bits CPU convert floats into doubles, then do the math in double, then convert back to floats, and this imposes a 30% tax on the raw math performance.

By moving 100% into doubles, the Physics Engine could, in theory at least, have a significant boost in raw performance on CPUs.

Problem: the Unity's Physics Engine, PhysX, are tied to singles. And I don't think this will change anytime in the near future, PhysX are meant to be useable on Math Accelerators (aka GPU) and these beasts can munch a pornographic amount of float numbers per second, while providing a poor performance on doubles - at least for the GPUs from the previous generations.

So in order to harvest that extra mile by avoiding the 30% of performance tax, we would need to switch KSP's physics engine completely - and this is what I think is probably a impossible mission.

Edited February 9 by Lisias
brute force post merging.

[corbeau217]

15 hours ago, Lisias said:

Interesting enough, the impact on memory would not be that much - you don't need to use doubles on everything, you can create local domains to be handled on floats and use doubles only when really needed - there're already some internal data using double internally anyway.

However… There's one point that would make a 100% shift to worth the memory tax: performance. When KSP was created in 32 bits, using floats was not only a no brainer, but also mandatory: we were using 32 bits CPUs. But then no one is using 32 bits anymore, and since then we are using floats on 64 bits hardware - what's worse. 64 bits CPU convert floats into doubles, then do the math in double, then convert back to floats, and this imposes a 30% tax on the raw math performance.

By moving 100% into doubles, the Physics Engine could, in theory at least, have a significant boost in raw performance on CPUs.

Problem: the Unity's Physics Engine, PhysX, are tied to singles. And I don't think this will change anytime in the near future, PhysX are meant to be useable on Math Accelerators (aka GPU) and these beasts can munch a pornographic amount of float numbers per second, while providing a poor performance on doubles - at least for the GPUs from the previous generations.

So in order to harvest that extra mile by avoiding the 30% of performance tax, we would need to switch KSP's physics engine completely - and this is what I think is probably a impossible mission.

interesting :O i had a feeling there was some weirdness with the conversion and type sizing for 64 bit

the thing i was trying to explain was kinda what you mention a little at the start? like if you used approximations until you needed the precision then chose float for fast approximate precision and double for latency heavy precision

honestly im curious what the difference become in the float algorithms to the double algorithms that make it that much faster. is it the size of the numbers or the fact we had more time with float and (sleepy brain cant think of other examples right now) fast inverse square root?

 

20 hours ago, Nazalassa said:

Sadly, this would not work that much better. Numerical storage is always limited by memory. What exactle do you mean by "seperating out the numerical storage into (0.0->1.0] and another for (0->UINT64_MAX)"? Do you mean something like this?:

 SIGN    INTEGER PART       DECIMAL PART
+----+------------------+------------------+

That is actually (and roughly) how numbers are stored in computers nowadays; fixed-point numbers are like this, while floating-point numbers are written using scientific notation (but in base two), like (-1)^s * a * 2^b  and so the numbers s (the sign ), a (the mantissa ) and b (the exponent ) are stored as a number. Note that whatever way you represent numbers, you can not store more than 2ⁿ different values within n bits. If you want more precision, then you'll need to use more memory, and the Kraken knows how much KSP already uses.

 

also kinda what was mentioned by both, im aware of how floats work right now but it's also less and less acurate at larger numbers. my idea was that you have them totally seperate so you dont have the weirdness of some float numbers having their fraction portion equal to more than 1 because of the math equation you apply to it to figure out its value (i cant remember what it was but it was goofy)

 

20 hours ago, Nazalassa said:

I have two possible interpretations for the passage I highlighted in bold; if it is the case, the fact that you are willing to financially support Unity (first possible interpretation) does not imply that you must buy KSP, I guess Unity has a "donations" button or the like.

In case you instead meant that you are willing to give the KSP team money so they can use Unity, be aware that the source code is not all of KSP. As it has been stated before in this thread, there also are the models, the configuration files, the asset bundles, etc., etc. that you will have to pay for; you can't play without those, so you'll still need to buy the game to be able to play. Therefore the KSP team will get money from people who (want to) play the game, and one usually doesn't look into something's source code if they do not use it.

i feel like you both missunderstood my sleepy words and me not realising the word arrangement was unique to australia (or very uncommon elsewhere). "im willing to put money on ..." is like saying "ill wager ..." or "i bet you `undefined`, that ..."
I'm not interested in giving unity money, they're doing fine as it is.

Also I got the sense that Squad customised the physics engine from the unity default by the way it's been talked about by the devs but maybe my mind has been playing tricks


Good points about the dlc/reputation, i hadn't thought of it that way. the customising the source code to handle their mods was more about ksp1 potentially having code to prevent copy+paste files into gamedata from another person's install, and needing to remove that then recompile (this is a guess about how it works, it makes sense to me for that to be there)

also for reference: almost all of what I say is in relation to ksp1 unless I specified ksp2 bc i havent touched ksp2 yet. All guesses about the inner workings from experience with other similar... situations (NDA, was government. soz)