KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[Alexoff]

16 hours ago, Spicat said:

...

Well, I was right, these bugs are known, but no one has dealt with them. I don't understand why no one pointed this out to me right away.

[snip]

And what can users constructively do on the forum? Together with developers, study the code and look for errors in it? So no one gives us access to the program code. Give advice on how to make the game faster and better? But we have no idea what's going on with the new features for the game.

Edited July 30, 2023 by Snark
Redacted by moderator

[regex]

2 hours ago, moeggz said:

.The patience is running thin

Is it? To do what I want to do in the game I gotta wait for them to completely overhaul the planetary rendering and terrain chain, and even then that might not fix my gripes. I'm fixin' to wait for a _long_ time before I start playing again, probably next year. I got nothing _but_ patience for Intercept. I wonder how many others out there aren't bothering with the pedantic circular arguments around here and are instead just in waiting mode?

What's gonna happen when y'all's patience runs out? What are you gonna do?

Edited July 29, 2023 by regex

[moeggz]

@regex I’m in a similar holding pattern. Got tired of a simple station I was trying to build as it kept self-destructing. Trust me I want the game to succeed. 
 

I bought the game and can’t return it. Nothing I can do. But the more the general sentiment goes negative the fewer sales happen the more likely KSP2 development is stopped before we reach all of the promised features. Less people are saying “wait to buy it will be good later” than are saying “don’t buy” right now on most platforms.

Edited July 30, 2023 by moeggz
Air destructing to self destructing.

[regex]

16 minutes ago, moeggz said:

But the more the general sentiment goes negative the fewer sales happen the more likely KSP2 development is stopped before we reach all of the promised features.

I highly doubt that but w/e, there's no talking people off the ledge here so no reason to press it.

And if development bombs, who cares? It's a video game ferchrisakes. If it gets better I'll play it more, if it doesn't I got 90 middling hours out of it, that's more than many other games I've paid $50 USD for.

[cocoscacao]

1 hour ago, regex said:

how many others out there aren't bothering with the pedantic circular arguments around here and are instead just in waiting mode?

+1
Though I'm gonna give feedback/criticism where it's needed.

[moeggz]

1 hour ago, regex said:

And if development bombs, who cares? It's a video game ferchrisakes. If it gets better I'll play it more, if it doesn't I got 90 middling hours out of it, that's more than many other games I've paid $50 USD for.

I don’t think I care particularly more than you. I would like it completed because I like KSP but it’s not like I’m claiming if it’s abandoned it will be the worst thing ever. I’m aware that it’s a video game and care enough to share my views on it on the forum, just like you. I don’t know how you’re getting the impression I’m on the ledge or some such.

Player counts on steam are abysmal and the reviews are at 50% and dropping. Pointing that out and coming to the conclusion that it may not reach 1.0 without drastic changes in development speed and quality doesn’t mean I’m going to become depressed if the game is canceled, or lose my mind if they do turn the corner and make it good.

[regex]

3 hours ago, moeggz said:

Pointing that out and coming to the conclusion that it may not reach 1.0 without drastic changes in development speed and quality

How is Intercept going to do that? Change their entire workflow? That takes time and severely slows down work until it's finished, and may not pan out. Work crunch time? That's a recipe for bad code. Hire more people? That would likely require more people to buy the game. Should they just release an update every time they finish up a bug ticket just to make it look like there's progress? That sounds like a recipe for the last update where someone forgot to flip a switch.

Be realistic. No matter how much you point out that "things have to change" the game is going to be made on its own time, Steam user numbers be damned. And seriously, why the hell do those numbers matter? It's an early access game.

[snip]

Edited July 30, 2023 by Gargamel
Content Redacted by Moderator

[PDCWolf]

On 7/29/2023 at 1:07 PM, The Aziz said:

Weird how that didn't help fixing the biggest problems of KSP1, right? 

Well, I was one of the first to speak against the buyout, not like that would've helped anything but at least my opinion on it was clear (and as far as I remember, pretty much in agreement with the rest of the community).

However, by all means, having such a huge investment and alleged professionals behind the franchise should've helped some, but said improvements still have to show up.

[regex]

2 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

People move on. Numbers might not matter to you, and that's fine, but they sure matter to them.

People come back to games when they're out of early access, they come back to games when new features are introduced, they come back to games when there's nothing else they want to play, etc... KSP1 saw a ton of additional sales right before it hit 1.0, IIRC. I have personally shelved or wishlisted some early access games because I don't want to get burnt out on the game before development is complete (as happened to me with KSP1 and Factorio, for instance). That's all anecdotal, sure, but just because I'm not playing the game doesn't mean I'm not interested in it.

Edited July 30, 2023 by regex

[Periple]

2 minutes ago, regex said:

That's all anecdotal, sure, but just because I'm not playing the game doesn't mean I'm not interested in it.

I bought into the BG3 EA ages ago and haven’t touched it in a year or more. Guess what I’ll be doing four days from now?

[THE_KERBAL]

I wonder When will the developers will be able to share new information about there new celestial body terrain system and switching to HDRP that they talked about in a forum post?  I personally think that the community would like like to know more about these as the will improve performance a lot when they are implemented.

On 3/10/2023 at 2:00 PM, Intercept Games said:

Hi Y’all, 

I’m Mortoc, the new graphics programmer on the team. I wanted to take some time to chat about KSP2’s graphics and performance – where we are today and what our process is and what the team’s goals are. 

As many of you have noticed, KSP2’s performance isn’t amazing at the start of Early Access. In a game as complex as KSP2, there are a dizzying number of areas that we could spend our efforts on and the feedback we’re receiving is invaluable for us to focus our time on the issues that affect the players the most.  

There are different reasons that the framerate can suffer. If the CPU is asked to do too much during simulation or if the CPU is asked to send too much data to the GPU in an organized fashion, it can make the framerate drop without maxing out the GPU. In most cases the performance in KSP2 is bottlenecked by the GPU, and since I'm a graphics engineer, that's what we're going to investigate in this article. Other engineers are working hard on CPU-facing improvements that you'll see reflected in upcoming updates. 

Deep Dive Warning: Numbers Ahead 

Before we dig into the numbers, let’s start with a primer on what we’re looking for here. Game developers tend to think of framerate in terms of milliseconds rather than FPS because it’s easier to budget out your frame time that way. Converting from FPS to ms is simple, you just use the formula 1,000 / FPS = ms (for example: 100 FPS means it takes 10ms per frame, 1,000 / 100 = 10). This way we’re talking about how long a system takes to run directly. We want to measure how many milliseconds each system in the game takes in order to figure out which are taking too much time and dropping the framerate. 

We use a tool called RenderDoc for our automated performance testing (among other tools). RenderDoc allows us to get the ground-truth timings for every single command sent to the GPU. Our tooling can then pull out the slowest GPU events for us to investigate.  

The machine I’m using here for performance analysis is a laptop with i7-8650U CPU, Mobile Nvidia GTX 1060 6gb GPU and 16gb RAM. It has a slower GPU than our current min spec, so we’re not expecting it to make a playable framerate yet. 

KSC Landing Screen – 11 FPS 

10 Slowest GPU Events	Draw #	Duration (ms)
PQSRENDERTEMP\Draw(229248)	270	6.08
RenderDeferred.GBuffer\Draw(229248)	505	5.84
RenderDeferred.GBuffer\Draw(229248)	506	5.44
CloudCommandBuffer\DrawIndexed(6)	746	4.43
Shadows.RenderJob\Shadows.RenderJobDir\Draw(229248)	652	4.31
GenerateWaterDepthCommand\Draw(229248)	576	3.18
RenderDeferred.GBuffer\Draw(229248)	503	1.72
RenderDeferred.GBuffer\Draw(229248)	504	1.63
Draw(229248)	263	1.62
cloudsShadowCommandBuffer\DrawIndexed(6)	560	1.58

In this scene, eight of the top ten worst-offenders are related to PQS+. PQS stands for Procedural Quad System and it’s the algorithm used to generate planet terrains. KSP2 uses a modified version of PQS from KSP1, generally referred to as PQS+ after all the modifications made to it for KSP2.  

That table starts with a draw call to PQSRENDERTEMP, which emits 229,248 vertices. Each other draw call that uses that specific number is doing some work on the PQS mesh. The two draw calls not related to PQS in that table are the ones with a 6 in the name and are related to the cloud system. From this report we can see that the terrain clearly takes the most GPU time in this scene; 29.94ms in total. 

Let’s try another vantage point. 

LKO – Low Graphics – 8 FPS 

10 Slowest GPU Events	Draw #	Duration (ms)
PQSRENDERTEMP\Draw(92160)	237	10.44
RenderDeferred.GBuffer\Draw(92160)	301	4.06
RenderDeferred.GBuffer\Draw(92160)	302	3.14
RenderDeferred.GBuffer\Draw(92160)	304	2.34
Dispatch(12, 240, 1)	1	2.07
RenderDeferred.GBuffer\Draw(92160)	303	1.59
CopyResource(ObserverCubemapView_CubemapFinal, ObserverCubemapView_Temp)	92	0.60
CopyResource(CelestialBodyCubemapView_CubemapFinal, CelestialBodyCubemapView_Temp)	184	0.33
Camera.Render\PQSRENDER_DEFERRED_DECAL_MASK\Draw(92160)	230	0.24
Camera.Render\Draw(92160)	227	0.23

As you travel away from any Celestial Body, we swap out the complex Local shader with a Scaled version that’s much more efficient. This scene is from Low Kerbin Orbit, but still close enough to the planet to be using the Local version of the shader. PQS+ is again 8 out of the top 10 worst calls (the line Dispatch(12, 240, 1) which is Draw Call #1 is from at the start of the frame when we kick off a compute shader to generate the terrain mesh). That first PQS+ call that took over 10ms is especially dirty. 

Staying Grounded 

Clearly the PQS System and related shaders are a big performance problem. Let’s talk about that, but first dig into some background. A core philosophy for the early part of KSP2’s EA cycle is to make sure “it still feels like a KSP game”.  This means that for each feature we build, we want to start with what KSP1 did and then build a similar system that improves on it. 

Following that goal, the team started with the PQS design from KSP1 and added modern graphics features for KSP2’s PQS+. As development progressed on KSP2, more and more features were added to PQS+ to keep pushing the artistic envelope.  

 

I might be biased, but from orbit, Kerbol’s planets look incredible. Our art team did a fantastic job. From the surface the game is still quite pretty, but the terrain itself just doesn’t have the consistent visual quality we want yet. While trying to build that ground up to our visual ambitions, we added more features than the previous PQS architecture can support. It wasn’t until the ramp up to EA that it became understood just how far past the limits of the tech we had reached.  

 

 

 

 

 

Future Trajectory 

OK, so, clearly there’s a problem, what are we going to do about it? A few things are being done simultaneously. First, we’re prioritizing performance optimizations for this system over the next couple of patches. Particularly for when graphics settings are “LOW”, we want this system to be eating far less GPU time. This takes two forms: one is pure engineering optimization that doesn’t affect final graphics, the other is to disable certain visual features when the graphics are set to “LOW” or “MEDIUM”. That first category, engineering-only fixes, was taken about as far as it could be with PQS+. Our short-term plans are currently focused on the 2nd category, turning off features that don’t provide enough bang for the buck.  

Here's an example of an optimization that affects the visuals. Coming soon in a patch, we will be able to turn off the Anti-Tile system in the terrain. In a bunch of places, the effect is negligible, but you can see the Eve surface has a repetitive texture artifact without it. This visual polish comes at the cost of accessing each texture a few more times, putting strain on the memory bandwidth of the GPU. Disabling this effect can have a small-to-medium sized effect on the framerate, depending on the GPU in question. 

Optimizations like that one are happening now and will arrive in the next few updates. The rest of this article deals with systems that are in progress, so we cannot make specific promises about timelines or features until further along in development. But here’s where we’re heading: 

In the medium term, my first major project on this team is to design and build a next-generation terrain system – what we’re calling the CBT system (it uses a Concurrent Binary Tree data structure, but it could also stand for Celestial Body Terrain). PQS+ has served us well, but nowadays video cards are much more flexible and there are more modern approaches that will give us better results in terms of performance and visual quality. Exciting new earth-shaking architectures are possible. The next-gen CBT system will be the topic of a future dev blog which will contain a much more detailed look at what we’re building. While it’s too early to share any details, I will say that I’m excited about the artistic expressiveness, potential terrain variety, and performance of the CBT system. 

Another area that will see a major shift in visual quality and performance is bringing the game up to Unity’s modern renderer, HDRP (read more about HDRP here if you’re curious, it rocks). The main benefits we get from HDRP are a more optimized render engine, which means faster framerates, and a more flexible shader model, which means more effective dev team efforts. It’ll also make it easier for visual mods to be built. As a sidenote, despite how much we love you modders, this change will definitely break most visual mods (sorry modders, sometimes we must hurt the ones we love). 

These in-progress changes will allow us to build more scientifically grounded yet fantastical worlds for the Kerbals to explore for years to come.  

 

Edited July 30, 2023 by THE_KERBAL
More stuff about the post

[cocoscacao]

40 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Well, I was one of the first to speak against the buyout, not like that would've helped anything but at least my opinion on it was clear

You'll probably find this response offensive, and admins are gonna snip it... oh well...

Several years ago, a company where I've worked at, was making some business choices that were forwned upon by almost all of my colleagues, myself included. It was a subject of debate on every break, and post-shift drinks. It lasted for a few months, and that conversation started bleeding in my private life eventually.

I was chugging beer with a friend of mine one evening. He asked me "How's work?", and I went on and on how managers were crapping all over the place with every decision they made, how directors didn't know what the hell they were doing, and that Y should have been done instead of X.

The guy patiently listened to my ramblings, and after I've finished, he sat in silence for a while, then sighed, and replied:
"Until you start your own business, the collective opinions of you, and your colleagues, is worth less than pidgeon's liquid. Weather you're correct or not about these things. Stop wasting time thinking about it, and please change the subject, I'm bored of listening to you".

I took his advice, albeit not immediately. Now I'm noticing my ex-behaviour in many of my friends when we start talking about everday happenings on work. Needless to say, I'm growing bored of them slowly as well...

Edited July 30, 2023 by cocoscacao

[schlosrat]

FWIW, I don't think the steam numbers tell the whole picture. Who wants to load the game through the Steam interface? I almost never fire up Steam or load KSP2 that way, and I'm in the game most days.

I think regex has it right. People will come back to try out new features, content, and bug fixes as they perceive those to be of interest. I expect when we get 0.2 (Science) we will see a bump in the numbers as ppl come back to check that out. Bug fix reports like this are helping to clarify what's going on with the bugs that have caused some to put the game aside for now, so that plays it's part as well.

10 minutes ago, regex said:

People come back to games when they're out of early access, they come back to games when new features are introduced, they come back to games when there's nothing else they want to play, etc... KSP1 say a ton of additional sales right before it hit 1.0, IIRC. I have personally shelved or wishlisted some early access games because I don't want to get burnt out on the game before development was complete (as happened to me with KSP1 and Factorio, for instance). That's all anecdotal, sure, but just because I'm not playing the game doesn't mean I'm not interested in it.

 

[cocoscacao]

14 minutes ago, schlosrat said:

I expect when we get 0.2 (Science) we will see a bump in the numbers as ppl come back to check that out

Meh... Even that isn't a full picture. If all critical bugs and wobble is fixed by that point, I'm still not touching it until colonies arrive... I'm bored of KSP 1 gameplay... unless science is way different...

Edited July 30, 2023 by cocoscacao

[The Aziz]

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

they've stopped advertising because the game is a wreck

They've stopped advertising because the game is out. Just like about any developer of an early access title. It'll be loud again when there's time for a huge update or in fact 1.0.

1 hour ago, regex said:

I have personally shelved or wishlisted some early access games because I don't want to get burnt out on the game before development was complete

Be glad you aren't in the game testing industry. (unless you are then I join you in pain) Your most anticipated game will be boring for you before it's even out for public.

[PDCWolf]

1 hour ago, regex said:

People come back to games when they're out of early access, they come back to games when new features are introduced, they come back to games when there's nothing else they want to play, etc... KSP1 say a ton of additional sales right before it hit 1.0, IIRC. I have personally shelved or wishlisted some early access games because I don't want to get burnt out on the game before development was complete (as happened to me with KSP1 and Factorio, for instance). That's all anecdotal, sure, but just because I'm not playing the game doesn't mean I'm not interested in it.

People "coming back" is not sales. You'll come back, but you will not be a new sale, you've already got the game and are part of that 700 to 1 million group of owners. A lot of people (though not the majority) are on the fence about refunding or staying. Lastly, the third group of people, and by far the biggest one, is the people who don't have the game, either because they don't know it exists, or advertisement hasn't reached them. Again, basing ourselves on KSP1 alone, there's still at least 9 million people left (on Steam alone) to purchase the game if we expect to equal the sales of the first.

How many of those 9 million do you think were watching or have watched and didn't like what they see and moved on? how many of them actually went in and refunded? how many of them are still watching to see if it comes out as something they'd want to spend their money on?.

1 hour ago, schlosrat said:

FWIW, I don't think the steam numbers tell the whole picture. Who wants to load the game through the Steam interface? I almost never fire up Steam or load KSP2 that way, and I'm in the game most days.

I think regex has it right. People will come back to try out new features, content, and bug fixes as they perceive those to be of interest. I expect when we get 0.2 (Science) we will see a bump in the numbers as ppl come back to check that out. Bug fix reports like this are helping to clarify what's going on with the bugs that have caused some to put the game aside for now, so that plays it's part as well.

 

People skipping Steam/the launcher are always a minority, even smaller than the people on Epic. This has been the case for every game with skippable DRM and though I've got no numbers for KSP2's specific case, I doubt it'd be the exception.

12 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

They've stopped advertising because the game is out. Just like about any developer of an early access title. It'll be loud again when there's time for a huge update or in fact 1.0.

Be glad you aren't in the game testing industry. (unless you are then I join you in pain) Your most anticipated game will be boring for you before it's even out for public.

They stopped advertising because the advertisement wasn't working, and people were plenty mad the game was being advertised in the state it was as well. Advertisement stopped on march 4th, barely a week after release. Advertising costs money, specially on TV, money that wasn't being recouped on sales. You don't stop advertising your only product that's just come out a week ago because "it's out". Yes, I'll get louder when there's a big update and stuff but that's not an explanation for why it got so quiet so fast after such a loud (yet almost useless) bang.

[regex]

4 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

People "coming back" is not sales.

People "coming back" isn't just people who bought the game and are waiting on it, it's also people who have wishlisted the game and are waiting for the actual release, future buyers who aren't entirely aware of its presence, or people who come back on release to see if the game got any better. As an example, I'm pretty sure KSP1 had a huge boost in sales when it hit 1.0. This is why I don't think Steam user numbers mean anything at all at this point, they're a completely useless metric.

[Spicat]

33 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Again, basing ourselves on KSP1 alone, there's still at least 9 million people left (on Steam alone) to purchase the game if we expect to equal the sales of the first.

Where did you get that amount? The only official statement about this indicate 5 million copies sold: https://www.privatedivision.com/2023/02/24/kerbal-space-program-2-launches-in-early-access-today/#:~:text=The original Kerbal Space Program,than 5 million units worldwide.

[PDCWolf]

2 hours ago, Spicat said:

Where did you get that amount? The only official statement about this indicate 5 million copies sold: https://www.privatedivision.com/2023/02/24/kerbal-space-program-2-launches-in-early-access-today/#:~:text=The original Kerbal Space Program,than 5 million units worldwide.

If you're up to believing PD, which I'm not, so far.

The highest estimates go from 6 to 10+ million copies on Steam alone, to which you have to add other storefronts as well. I think the absolute lowest estimate I saw for Steam ownership is SteamSpy's at 3.5 million. PlayTracker says 6.2 million. SteamDB's own review multiplication method goes from 4 to 10.4 million, and again, all of this on Steam alone.

[PDCWolf]

5 hours ago, cocoscacao said:

You'll probably find this response offensive

snip

Contrary to what I guess is the idea of this post, I only wanted to make it clear to the other poster that I was not in favor of, or somehow of the idea that having T2 on board would be good. Also, you went to a bar, with a friend, this is not a bar nor are any of you my friends, we're here to discuss a videogame, and all the sub-topics that might include.

[Spicat]

17 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

If you're up to believing PD, which I'm not, so far.

The highest estimates go from 6 to 10+ million copies on Steam alone, to which you have to add other storefronts as well. I think the absolute lowest estimate I saw for Steam ownership is SteamSpy's at 3.5 million. PlayTracker says 6.2 million. SteamDB's own review multiplication method goes from 4 to 10.4 million, and again, all of this on Steam alone.

Do you really think they will downplay how much copies they sold?? They have absolutely no reasons to show a lower sales than what they did, that makes no sense.

[PDCWolf]

Just now, Spicat said:

Do you really think they will downplay how much copies they sold?? They have absolutely no reasons to show a lower sales than what they did, that makes no sense.

They, as in PD, did not sell most of those copies themselves. Sure, they own the franchise now, but those sales are 90% a merit of the previous owner.

[Spicat]

2 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

They, as in PD, did not sell most of those copies themselves. Sure, they own the franchise now, but those sales are 90% a merit of the previous owner.

How is that changing anything to how much copies ksp were sold?? They know the numbers.

2 millions copies back in 2017 when they were bought

Following this trend, 5 millions make sense, why would they even lie?? If they want to charm investors, they have every reason to pump those numbers up.

I know that the current community argument is to say that everything devs said are lies but here it's not some promises, it would be Take2 lying to investors, and still it makes no sense to lie about those numbers even more by lowering them. (And legally it might be very bad)

[cocoscacao]

29 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

we're here to discuss a videogame

Than do so. Business side of things has nothing to do with the game itself... except project finished/cancelled.

Edited July 30, 2023 by cocoscacao

[TickleMyMary]

5 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

Than do so. Business side of things has nothing to do with the game itself... except project finished/cancelled.

There's no game without the 'business side'... So, I beg to differ.

 

6 hours ago, cocoscacao said:

Stop wasting time thinking about it, and please change the subject, I'm bored of listening to you".

Yes.