Kerbal Space Program 2 (not dying and getting a new owner) Hype Train.

[Infinite Aerospace]

7 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

I'd say it's a good thing he didn't. Imagine all the problems of KSP 2 right now, but without any dV readouts. ⅕

Rose tinted glasses are a powerful accessory. People seem to forget that KSP1's code is a tangled mess, but when one hundred and three mods are added to it, and load times reach twenty minutes, it looks better than KSP2. 

[The Aziz]

It really doesn't. For the 1528th time, no mod was able to bump up the heightmap resolution and that's where KSP1 will always lose.

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, The Aziz said:

It really doesn't. For the 1528th time, no mod was able to bump up the heightmap resolution and that's where KSP1 will always lose.

Yeah. Not to mention people seem to completely ignore all the stability, compatibility and performance issues when dealing with more than 5 mods, just so long as they can place KSP 1 on a pedestal. Call me crazy but the load times of stock KSP 1 are idiotic by itself. Does a ten year old game need to load everything into RAM and  cap load times to framerate? Is it me, or is that ridiculous for an early-2010s title? I've seen far more optimisation in amateur 90s games and I think that's a generous assessment.

[GluttonyReaper]

2 hours ago, The Aziz said:

It really doesn't. For the 1528th time, no mod was able to bump up the heightmap resolution and that's where KSP1 will always lose.

This is probably the one thing that genuinely would have gotten me to finally pick up KSP2 had it ever become reasonably stable and reached feature-parity (or close enough) to KSP1. Even the most well-designed mod planets for KSP1 never quite got away from the polygonal look that the stock planets had.

48 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Call me crazy but the load times of stock KSP 1 are idiotic by itself. Does a ten year old game need to load everything into RAM and  cap load times to framerate?

Like many things in KSP1, it's definitely one of those things that seemed like a reasonable thing to do when the game was a fun little project that was just thrown together and had only a handful of parts to load each time... but alas, evidently they never got around to rebuilding that system (and perhaps it was too ingrained even when they had the time post 1.1?). I seem to recall there was a mod that actually did add load-on-demand, but I have no idea if it survived to the final versions of the game.

Edited May 15 by GluttonyReaper

[Bej Kerman]

33 minutes ago, GluttonyReaper said:

I seem to recall there was a mod that actually did add load-on-demand, but I have no idea if it survived to the final versions of the game.

Not to my knowledge, I can remember looking and the closest thing was woefully outdated. Still, it's extremely funny that modders could be bothered to do it, but not the people who were getting paid to maintain the game. It's like Squad realised they were sitting on a steady stream of cash and decided they could just drag their heels, only adding the occasional novelty (see: fireworks, comets).

[K^2]

4 hours ago, GluttonyReaper said:

I seem to recall there was a mod that actually did add load-on-demand, but I have no idea if it survived to the final versions of the game.

I'm not sure how you'd even do that as a mod, TBH. If some mod achieved it, I'd be interested to see how they've done it. Granted, Unity is probably the engine I have least experience with, but load-on-demand is a pain in the rear in general. And in KSP1 you have an added bonus that part configs are parsed from text (slowly and painfully, which is why loading time is that bad) every single time. I doubt part configurations end up taking a lot of space, but the way KSP1 is architected, decoupling the configs from assets would not be trivial for a mod. I have a feeling a lot of custom loaders would have to be written and replaced in game's memory to make this viable... Sounds like a lot of work for something likely to be an unstable pile of jank.

KSP2 loading was organized differently. Though, I was still a little disappointed with the fact that transitions still existed at all. This might be some hard Unity limitation. I'm having hard time believing a commercial engine doesn't have facilities to support seamless scene transitions, but it wouldn't be the first time Unity surprised me this way. But at least the game avoids loading everything everywhere at once, and that's good for a start.

[GluttonyReaper]

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

m not sure how you'd even do that as a mod, TBH. If some mod achieved it, I'd be interested to see how they've done it. Granted, Unity is probably the engine I have least experience with, but load-on-demand is a pain in the rear in general. And in KSP1 you have an added bonus that part configs are parsed from text (slowly and painfully, which is why loading time is that bad) every single time. I doubt part configurations end up taking a lot of space, but the way KSP1 is architected, decoupling the configs from assets would not be trivial for a mod. I have a feeling a lot of custom loaders would have to be written and replaced in game's memory to make this viable... Sounds like a lot of work for something likely to be an unstable pile of jank.

KSP2 loading was organized differently. Though, I was still a little disappointed with the fact that transitions still existed at all. This might be some hard Unity limitation. I'm having hard time believing a commercial engine doesn't have facilities to support seamless scene transitions, but it wouldn't be the first time Unity surprised me this way. But at least the game avoids loading everything everywhere at once, and that's good for a start.

Did some digging, and surprisingly it does seem to still exist on the forums!

This is all pre-1.0, obviously (the 86x memory limit was a heck of problem for early modded installs) - I don't have the technical knowledge to tell how it works, but to a totally untrained eye it looks like it was replacing only the textures in the game with low-res versions, then switching them out as needed. Like you said though, it's noted on that page even that it was a bit of a crash-happy mess... and I have dim memories of the loader often failing and leaving you stuck with the blurry low-res textures for half your parts.

More interestingly though, apparently someone did set up something that worked post 1.0...

...but that was also apparently broken by the update to Unity 5 in 1.1. Evidently it wasn't really worth the hassle after that, given since 64x became officially supported, no-one's released anything similar since.

Edited May 15 by GluttonyReaper

[AtomicTech]

18 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

I'd say it's a good thing he didn't. Imagine all the problems of KSP 2 right now, but without any dV readouts. ⅕

Y'know, sometimes we've just gotta keep our thoughts to ourselves.

[Bej Kerman]

6 hours ago, AtomicTech said:

Y'know, sometimes we've just gotta keep our thoughts to ourselves.

Thanks for your input

[Dakitess]

On 5/15/2024 at 10:30 AM, The Aziz said:

It really doesn't. For the 1528th time, no mod was able to bump up the heightmap resolution and that's where KSP1 will always lose.

And still, the terrain and graphics associated remained so damn poor in KSP2. It's aesthetically ugly, which is a personal point of view involving taste, but also technically completely outdated. KSP1 with mods is definitely more worth its appearance than a 2023 KSP2 which looks crap AND very weird, inhomogeneous, almost bugged. Its physic is very perfectible (hitbox), its textures lacks consistency and details (and shaders, and...), it has barely no scatters, even less physical one, the Micro-Med-Macro topology is something between KSP1 and a 2015 game, has not character, no scenery, the lightning interact with every part of the ground so bad (horizon line in the backlight, please, seriously... It's like a staircase showroom xD), it doesn't match the craft colorimetry (or the other way), and the easter eggs are, like... Dropped assets with no transition whatsoever with the surrounding, not the same texture resolution, and react even worst to lightning.

Really, KSP2 graphics is a joke.

Edited May 16 by Dakitess

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, Dakitess said:

Really, KSP2 graphics is a joke.

Pretty much all the problems you described also apply to KSP 1.

[Dakitess]

Which, eh, yeah, hum... indeed ? Yeah, like, does it change anything to the point ? Does it allow KSP2 to look like a 2015 game ?

I won't ever understand that argument.

It's specifically why so much graphics mods exist on KSP1 and why they are among the most popular. It's specifically why a new game developed from scratch by a pro team rather than a pile of update along 10 years based on an Indie Game by an "amateur" (as talented as he was !), was the opportunity to build something clean, with a proper updated basis, to allow for an up to date graphics while preserving performance and opening even more to the mod community.

Yeah, really, that "So was KSP1" point is really out of my reach.

Edited May 16 by Dakitess

[Bej Kerman]

21 minutes ago, Dakitess said:

Which, eh, yeah, hum... indeed ? Yeah, like, does it change anything to the point ? Does it allow KSP2 to look like a 2015 game ?

I won't ever understand that argument.

It's specifically why so much graphics mods exist on KSP1 and why they are among the most popular. It's specifically why a new game developed from scratch by a pro team rather than a pile of update along 10 years based on an Indie Game by an "amateur" (as talented as he was !), was the opportunity to build something clean, with a proper updated basis, to allow for an up to date graphics while preserving performance and opening even more to the mod community.

Yeah, really, that "So was KSP1" point is really out of my reach.

Hm;

25 minutes ago, Dakitess said:

KSP1 with mods is definitely more worth its appearance than a 2023 KSP2 which looks crap AND very weird, inhomogeneous, almost bugged

[Fizzlebop Smith]

8 hours ago, Dakitess said:

And still, the terrain and graphics associated remained so damn poor in KSP2. It's aesthetically ugly, which is a personal point of view involving taste, but also technically completely outdated. KSP1 with mods is definitely more worth its appearance than a 2023 KSP2 which looks crap AND very weird, inhomogeneous, almost bugged. Its physic is very perfectible (hitbox), its textures lacks consistency and details (and shaders, and...), it has barely no scatters, even less physical one, the Micro-Med-Macro topology is something between KSP1 and a 2015 game, has not character, no scenery, the lightning interact with every part of the ground so bad (horizon line in the backlight, please, seriously... It's like a staircase showroom xD), it doesn't match the craft colorimetry (or the other way), and the easter eggs are, like... Dropped assets with no transition whatsoever with the surrounding, not the same texture resolution, and react even worst to lightning.

Really, KSP2 graphics is a joke.

This problem often affects me. My thoughts seem completely cogent and logical when viewed from the lens of my inner most mind (as they flow throw my thumbs). 

However often I find upon review, that others must surely consider my ramblings to be that of a mad man.

This is where I will go in to add proper punctuation & change various fat finger mistakes that spell check enjoys taunting me with.

Then I post and edit it six more times to try to clean up formatting with at least one of those being geared at making things somewhat more understandable to the general masses.

 

Edited May 16 by Fizzlebop Smith

[Superfluous J]

12 hours ago, Dakitess said:

KSP2 graphics is a joke.

Am I the only one on the forum that doesn't give a ... love or whatever the forum changes it to ... about the graphics?

Give me colonies and interstellar and I'll play with Atari 2600 graphics.

Okay maybe not Atari 2600. But KSP1 stock for sure.

(Note I'm not talking about the UI/UX fiasco that is that dot-matrix font. I'm talking about how the planets look. Which incidentally I think is fantastic)

[Dakitess]

You actually belong to the majority of people that seems to not care a lot about graphics, when it comes to KSP2, I think.

Majority might be right. GamePlay and content is essential. But I feel like for KSP2, this is a bit different. We already had a functional and feature complete KSP1 which was big enough to enjoy it for thousand of hours. But it was flawed by an IndieDev that started with a single guy, a 12 yo technical basis that barely got updated, and then got patched with new things, new content, new mechanics during a decade : it's not very "clean". KSP2 had the potential to fix that very main basis, to get everything equal to KSP1 but with a up to date foundation so that then, content would be added more easily, be it official or with mods. And in "Technical Update", of course, there is performance, stability AND graphics, enjoying 10 years of progress on that aspect.

I really think that they would have gone further by now with that logic, content and gameplay wise, rather than fighting with bugs on an already outdated basis which won't please the "graphics and scenery guys", but neither the "content and gameplay guys", like you, since, well, it never went anywhere  At the very least, having a KSP2 failing 1 year after releasing, but being the KSP1 clone while totally revamped technically speaking, would have been a major step forward, a milestone to take benefit from.

@FizzleBop : sorry, did not really get what you meant. I guess it's about my grammatical issues, typos, etc : English is not my native language and I don't use any translator so that I can learn how to write more fluently, be it on official document with more attention, or on forum, with something more everyday language.

[Scarecrow71]

13 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

Am I the only one on the forum that doesn't give a ... love or whatever the forum changes it to ... about the graphics?

Give me colonies and interstellar and I'll play with Atari 2600 graphics.

Okay maybe not Atari 2600. But KSP1 stock for sure.

(Note I'm not talking about the UI/UX fiasco that is that dot-matrix font. I'm talking about how the planets look. Which incidentally I think is fantastic)

I would care more about the graphics if the core gameplay was correct.  Until then, I don't give a rat's patootie about graphics.

[kerbiloid]

On 5/15/2024 at 1:39 PM, Bej Kerman said:

Call me crazy but the load times of stock KSP 1 are idiotic by itself.

This person didn't own ZX Spectrum...

Happy times...

[hendrack]

On 5/15/2024 at 8:18 AM, Infinite Aerospace said:

Rose tinted glasses are a powerful accessory. People seem to forget that KSP1's code is a tangled mess, but when one hundred and three mods are added to it, and load times reach twenty minutes, it looks better than KSP2. 

Have you seen these threads?

 

This loading screen fps thingy is still relevant with the latest KSP1 version.

I have around 150 mods... Bluedog, Tantares, Tundra, SXT, Near Future and all those big mods with a gazillion parts, my KSP is ready in 7 minutes. That's still much and its a pity KSP does not have something like Cities Skylines loading screen mod (because C:S had the same problem like KSP, loading all assets at once, with random crashes) but it's not that bad as it used to be.  Use:

• ksp community fixes
• disable vsync and raise fps limit in launcher
• throw in loadingscreenmanager with a single 1x1 pixel png for extra fps and good measure
• block KSP in your firewall for extra good measure (I am not sure that old unity bug where every asset is loaded via http and searched on every network device is still an issue).

Back in game you can use kerbokatzes fps limiter so your GPU doesn't melt.

Back on topic of the hype train, it finally derailed. This dumpster fire was the mother of all hypetrain derailments. I've written it a year ago, I say it again: instead of bling bling videos, take those 70 devs, lock them in a room for 5 years and build a rock stable good physics engine and then go into EA with abysmal graphics and whatnot, then build around that foundation. We space nerds would have loved it.  Look at Digital Combat Simulator. Look how they transitioned from Flanker 2.5 to Lock On: Modern Air Combat (which had a lot of issues), until they finally concentrated on making DCS World and their engine, now they and 3rd-party developers throw out module after module every year, and we flight simmers throw our hard earned money at them.

Edited May 19 by hendrack

[Stephensan]

24 minutes ago, hendrack said:

my KSP is ready in 7 minutes

that is honestly 6 minutes and 30 seconds too many at best, with max optimizations.

33 minutes ago, hendrack said:

That's still much and its a pity

And that is without restarts, any crash requires a restart, or random weird ksp 1 shenanigans that requires restarts depending on rng a entire gaming session can be like half an hour of just waiting for the game to LOAD to the game, let along loading times for rocket(s). i don't even need to compare it to ksp 2.

 

7 minutes is enough for water to boil to make instant (insert most foods) or even a cup of coffee with a 1500w electric kettle.

 

I'm over ksp 1 load times tbh and if ksp 2 is completely done never to get updated, ksp franchise will fizzler out of my life, a majority childhood playing this game was riddled with loading times for both launching the game and launching crafts due to having a "sub optional" laptop/school computer.. 2024 is here and ksp 1 is trying to be boasted of 7~ minutes load times with much higher end systems with mods just to "be the best ksp 1" there is.....

Feel sorry for most people that just glance at the issue of load times, reminds me of the fights about SSD vs HDD and "load times don't matter" when it first came out.

[hendrack]

5 minutes ago, Stephensan said:

that is honestly 6 minutes and 30 seconds too many at best, with max optimizations.

And that is without restarts, any crash requires a restart, or random weird ksp 1 shenanigans that requires restarts depending on rng a entire gaming session can be like half an hour of just waiting for the game to LOAD to the game, let along loading times for rocket(s). i don't even need to compare it to ksp 2.

 

7 minutes is enough for water to boil to make instant (insert most foods) or even a cup of coffee with a 1500w electric kettle.

 

I'm over ksp 1 load times tbh and if ksp 2 is completely done never to get updated, ksp franchise will fizzler out of my life, a majority childhood playing this game was riddled with loading times for both launching the game and launching crafts due to having a "sub optional" laptop/school computer.. 2024 is here and ksp 1 is trying to be boasted of 7~ minutes load times with much higher end systems with mods just to "be the best ksp 1" there is.....

Feel sorry for most people that just glance at the issue of load times, reminds me of the fights about SSD vs HDD and "load times don't matter" when it first came out.

I am not boasting. 7 minutes is arguably better than 20 minutes that the poor soul I have quoted waits for his game to start. KSP1 with mods is what it is. No point arguing over that.

[Stephensan]

2 minutes ago, hendrack said:

I am not boasting. 7 minutes is arguably better than 20 minutes that the poor soul I have quoted waits for his game to start. KSP1 with mods is what it is. No point arguing over that.

im not arguing but even 7 minutes is extremely long for a game to load, i remember those loading times and it just made me close the game most of the time, i was on a timer to play video games at home so it was a pain to ask parents to load up ksp 2 on my laptop that isn't counted as my "gaming time" cause they lock and put asleep the PC after 10 minutes cause i would take my laptop to play ksp 1 more, or need for speed carbon.

[Bej Kerman]

14 minutes ago, hendrack said:

I am not boasting. 7 minutes is arguably better than 20 minutes that the poor soul I have quoted waits for his game to start. KSP1 with mods is what it is. No point arguing over that.

"7 minutes < 20 minutes" isn't gonna convince anyone that anything longer than 30 seconds is worth waiting.

[Scarecrow71]

40 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

"7 minutes < 20 minutes" isn't gonna convince anyone that anything longer than 30 seconds is worth waiting.

I'm not sure why people are irritated over load times.  I guess I grew up before the age of instant gratification?

My KSP1, with mods, is up in like 3 minutes.  I'm not bothered by that.  I'm not getting antsy that I don't have a rocket in orbit 30 seconds after clicking the icon to launch the game.  I just simply font care if I have to wait a bit.

Am I alone in that?  I can't be the only person who isn't bothered by this.

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

"7 minutes < 20 minutes" isn't gonna convince anyone that anything longer than 30 seconds is worth waiting.

How about waiting 12 months 9 Months and 18 Days for having Science?

Edited May 20 by Lisias
Ok, happy now? :)