What tool and steps are required to unpack the assets?

[Jason_25]

I am not able to achieve more than 30 FPS in the game with the smallest rocket on any graphics settings.  The problem appears to be all the high quality buildings at the space center.   I just upgraded my graphics card for this game.  It would be easy enough to buy another graphics card that is better but I have this thing about consuming too much power.  Already KSP 2 is making my graphics card consume too much power versus the very low "fun" return and the entire equation is just unacceptable.  Given the low fun factor I can only dedicate around 50 watts of electricity to the game.  If there were fully realized star systems I would go out today and buy the best graphics card available.

My thoughts were to remove the buildings by removing them from the game folders.  As someone else has already pointed out there is no gamedata folder.  Whether this is an attempt at optimization or obfuscation I don't know and don't care.

How would I go about opening the .assets file to start stripping stuff out?  I found this but I wanted to see what others think first because it does not look like it is going to be easy: https://github.com/nesrak1/UABEA/issues.  Time to begin the self-punishment.

 

 

[HansAcker]

Can't you just wait before stripping assets from a game barely a day after its early access release?

scnr. I'll wait a few updates before I install KSP 2.

 

Edited February 25, 2023 by HansAcker

[Jason_25]

I figured someone would have already started on the project.  Realistically, the decades of development experience to know how to do this dwarfs the value of the best computer hardware.  So I might as well just upgrade because I don't have what it takes to understand reverse engineering at this level.

As for me, I found out that my new graphics card is not actually better than the old.  I "upgraded" to an RX 6700 from a 9 year old R9 390X and the 390X has about the same amount of memory bandwidth as the 6700 due to the larger memory interface width.  I guess I am going to go to a RX 6800 with about twice the memory bandwidth of these sad little cards.  You really have to be careful because $400 gets you nothing but a piece of garbage.

It still costs about $800+ to game at 4K with good speed and I naively thought that midrange cards could do it since we have been gaming at 4K nearly a decade now.  It only costs about $20 for a used mini PC to game at 1080p with good speed.  KSP 2 is the new benchmark.  The new Crysis.  Really Microsoft FSX performed even worse than Crysis during the same period so flight simulation has always been a driver of new hardware.    With that said, KSP is running slow for me even at 720p resolution.

Anybody PC gaming these days needs to be ready to pay to play that's for sure.  Much more expensive than living inside an arcade.  Starfield and the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion are going to be no easier on hardware either so I just have to bite the bullet.  I wonder what kind of incredible new graphics techniques the team is pioneering to give hardware such a hard time.  They must have a team of doctorate level computer scientists working on the game to create software this demanding.  They probably - like - developed a whole new way of ray tracing and stuff.  Gosh they are so smart it is hard to even get into the thought processes of people like that you know?

Obviously the game needs optimization too.

[schlosrat]

@Jason_25There is a fairly simple work around for extremely low FPS situations. You've probably already noticed this, but just in case not, or for others wandering down this path, you might try pointing your camera skyward. This works great on launches and landings - yes, landings! Nearly every craft I've landed on the Mun I've don so by pointing my camera to the sky and watching the nav ball in surface nav mode. I call this my Kerbal Instrument Flight Rating - K-IFR. If you know the place you're setting down in is reasonably flat, then try this. For sure it works wonders on launches from KSC.

[Jason_25]

I am sure that helps for rocket launches but I have been building a "trainer" spaceplane since the game has come out.   I see that there are two mods now that address performance:

https://github.com/elsantiF/KOPMod

https://spacedock.info/mod/3256/LagRemover

I have not tried either yet because I want to at least get to space in my spaceplane before modding the game.  Overclocking the graphics card and modding the ini file for the game did not help.  I am down to about 12 FPS now during ascent with about 90 parts.  GPU usage is definitely 100% for the most part.  Occasionally I will catch it with low utilization like KSP 1 but it is clear that the graphics card is what is holding this game back.

[Jason_25]

Another update to this catchall thread.

I tried the KOPMod and it just made the game uglier but did not speed it up enough to justify the worse visuals.  It basically increases the "high" frame rate and does nothing to the "low" frame rate.  The menu frame rate is through the roof with this mod so if you already did not think the menu was super fast this will make it faster.

I get the same 15 fps when starting my 6 jet engines with or without the KOP mod.  This game just punishes people that use jets.  Jets alone may be the #1 framerate hog right now.  I am going to try to build a plane that uses the large jet engines and only use 2 or 3.  The streamers are all building vertical rockets with no jet engines.  Good for them I guess.

I am not going to try the lag remover because it messes with the physics and makes the game look worse than KSP 1.  I am concerned that I could be playing a build that flies differently without the mod.

I went ahead and ordered an RX 6800 graphics card. Incredibly this card is not even on the recommended system requirements.  I could have ordered an RX 6800 XT for the same price but the shipping would take longer.  I did not appreciate how much power my old card used so hopefully this non-XT version will still be fairly power efficient.

Every streamer for this game has at least an AMD 6900 series or Nvidia 3080 series.  High end graphics cards 20 years ago only cost about $450.  My BFG Geforce 6800 Ultra OC was that much right after it came out.  I think it was the fastest single GPU card in the world.  I think I still have it somewhere.

It is weird to see people talking about this or that being the major performance problem and already modding the files but here we are with no working mods to increase the fps!  There I go being stupid again.  I just listed the reasons that everyone else is getting better performance.  They are using high end graphics or launching traditional vertical rockets.  So I just need to wait it out until my new graphics arrive if I want to use planes and jets.

[munix]

1 hour ago, Jason_25 said:

I get the same 15 fps when starting my 6 jet engines with or without the KOP mod.  This game just punishes people that use jets.  Jets alone may be the #1 framerate hog right now.  I am going to try to build a plane that uses the large jet engines and only use 2 or 3.  The streamers are all building vertical rockets with no jet engines.  Good for them I guess.

Jet engines by themselves should not be an issue. What is an issue is how the fuel flow system is implemented, meaning the more engines draining from more fuel tanks you have, the worse the lag. The system is fairly complex for a mod to overcome, the modders would basically have to rewrite one of the core game systems from scratch. It will definitely get updated by the devs at some point, they know about the issue.

1 hour ago, Jason_25 said:

It is weird to see people talking about this or that being the major performance problem and already modding the files but here we are with no working mods to increase the fps!

Another big reason (probably the biggest) for the bad performance is the planet surface shaders (aka lag when looking down, but not when looking up in the sky), and once again, that is a pretty big core system of the game and it isn't for modders to solve, but for the developers.

Yes, there are mods that attempt to improve performance by doing what little they can without being backed by a studio and paid for it. And yes, they can't do much.

As for "is weird to see people talking about this or that being the major performance problem" - yes, there are a lot of people (in the modding Discord at least) debugging and profiling these issues, but it's in no way their job to fix this stuff. If anything, it's meant to be feedback for the developers to help them pinpoint the roots of the most painful performance issues and bugs.

Edited March 3, 2023 by munix

[Jason_25]

The fuel tanks being part of the problem coincides with what I am seeing.  Most of the vehicles I have seen people build are a few fuel tanks with wings and a cockpit.  But I have been building the same way as I build in KSP with many small fuel tanks to fit into an intended design.  As opposed to using large tanks and just building around those.  I think I will keep this in mind as I build my next vehicle.  No fuel tanks unless they will be large and very useful.

It is clear that the modders and developers do not have the urgency that I have to play the game.  If they are building simple spaceplanes or rockets and have a fairly powerful graphics card they are going to have a good time already.  I usually only build large or complex vehicles.  I got caught with my pants down on having a crap graphics card.

I forgot to mention that despite the problems I built my Jet/Nuclear SSTO and got it into orbit with an acceptable amount of fuel remaining.  It looks better than anything I have seen on here or anything I have seen the developers make for that matter.  Because it doesn't matter where you go if you don't look cool doing it.

[munix]

1 minute ago, Jason_25 said:

It is clear that the modders and developers do not have the urgency that I have to play the game.

Oh trust me, there are quite a few prominent modders who can't even get the game to run at all (or barely) due to the performance issues, and it's not that they wouldn't like to fix the game if they could, it's just totally out of the scope of modding, at this point they'd basically have to rewrite half of the game, and it's just not viable. Better to just wait for official updates, although I understand it's frustrating. I myself spent like 95% of time with KSP 2 just coding some mods/tweaks and 5% playing, because the game is so buggy that I don't even have almost any fun playing it, even if the performance for me isn't too terrible (with reasonably small vessels).