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KSP2 is Spamming the Windows Registry Over Weeks/Months Until the Game Will Stop Working Permanently

Anth

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Vanamonde

Vanamonde

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Posted

Some confusing and off-topic posts have been removed, for clarity's sake. 

We get that people are angry, and that's allowable, but directing insults at the devs or each other only makes the forum a less pleasant place to visit. Please take the language down a notch. 

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mattihase

mattihase

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On 9/24/2023 at 9:15 PM, cheese3660 said:

This does not seem to be the case here, what they were doing makes sense, using unities player preferences to store what should be a small amount of stuff, but their implementation of it has a bug that makes it that they are storing it in a different key each time

Wait, Unity's Playerprefs uses the registry?
 

can't say I'm a fan of that either.  Unity is getting side eyed for enabling this problem.

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didkodidko

didkodidko

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Everyone relax. It's simple PQS data saved in registry that is supposed to be updated in one reg key only, instead ksp2 is making different keys every time it updates.

Go to registry and review yours. It's not bad for your PC but it's not a good practice and is badly implemented.

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Jacke

Jacke

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Posted (edited)

Because the Registry is a number of external files, within the program, this is technically IO.  Because it's the Registry, that IO is likely done through a special API to send keys and values to the Registry, likely with flags about addition or updating or something.  Whatever.  When you have to code it, you look up the API and be sure you know what to do.  Even when you've done it before.

When you're doing IO, you have to code very carefully.  Because it's very easy for the smallest error in the code--whether regular file IO or Registry changes--to produce masses of garbage in either the IO streams (standard input, output, error, open files, specials) or via a special API to the Registry.  Similar problems with dynamic data structures, especially those mapped or written to files.

All this code has to be as simple as possible so the programmers can be sure it does what's needed and not acting like a bunch of monkey trying to reproduce all of Shakespeare.

Edited by Jacke
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Mikki

Mikki

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Posted (edited)
On 9/24/2023 at 11:14 PM, Buzz313th said:

Outa curiosity..   Who in their right mind is so fond of KSP2 right now, they will risk running a game that is spamming the registry and then on top of it, run some random person's code to delete blocks of reg data?

Unreal and absolutely pathetic.  

...Maybe peeps like me. My RL probs at work are way, way more concerning and even sometimes live treathening other than this beautiful enterprise called KSP2. I don`t care about me anymore, i mostly care for others, but this is the burden of age and experience. Blowing up a PC at home is nothing against blowing up equipment and property of others in a second, worth bizarre amounts of... funds.

I really don`t care about bugs in early access, as severe as they might appear.

 I see the progress and a certain vision of the development and can distinguish developers from publishers, who each have their own ambitions to survive.

Time will tell, as allways.

Let them bugs coming! :D

BTW i can clear the registry on my own which gives me a minimum amount of responsibility while wrecking my own stuff....

Edited by Mikki
aaaaaaaaah typo
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RockyTV

RockyTV

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Posted (edited)

I don't know why this showed up in KSP2. What is Intercept doing different from KSP1 that we never had a problem like this back then? Are they literally storing object information to the registry and using the instance ID as the subkey, which as others pointed out, it changes every time the game is launched? As for the data they're storing, is this a consequence of not using ConfigNodes as KSP1 used? Why store this information on the registry and not on files? And lastly, this just adds more fuel to the fire that Intercept Games don't even know what they're doing, as pointed out by other members. This is shameful. And mark my words, it will take a week for this hotfix to be released, because it's critical but not critical enough that it should be fixed on the next day after confirming and reproducing this bug.

On 9/25/2023 at 2:03 AM, HebaruSan said:

If this is still planned to ever be a cross-platform title, trying to store anything at all to the Windows registry should probably cause a post-build automated test to fail. Mono has a registry emulation capability (CKAN used to use it), but why go that route if you don't have to?

Judging from the past where Take2 doesn't like Linux, I don't believe this will be a problem for them.

Even then, the PlayerPrefs docs page on the Unity website list the location for each OS where this class is saved to:

 

Quote

Standalone player and in-Editor Play mode storage location

- MacOS: ~/Library/Preferences/com.ExampleCompanyName.ExampleProductName.plist



Standalone Player storage location

- Android: /data/data/pkg-name/shared_prefs/pkg-name.v2.playerprefs.xml. Note that C#, Android Java and native code can all access the PlayerPrefs data.

- iOS: Uses the [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] API to store PlayerPrefs data.

- Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/ExampleCompanyName/ExampleProductName

- WebGL: Unity stores up to 1MB of PlayerPrefs data using the browser's IndexedDB API. For more information, see IndexedDB.

- Windows: HKCU\Software\ExampleCompanyName\ExampleProductName

- Windows Universal Platform: %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Packages\[ProductPackageId]\LocalState\playerprefs.dat

so if they ever release a Linux client, if they use PlayerPrefs it will be saved to a different location other than the registry.

(and interesting observation, UWP games store it in a file inside AppData, why are standalone games using the Registry?)

Edited by RockyTV
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Buzz313th

Buzz313th

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Posted
6 hours ago, Mikki said:

...Maybe peeps like me. My RL probs at work are way, way more concerning and even sometimes live treathening other than this beautiful enterprise called KSP2. I don`t care about me anymore, i mostly care for others, but this is the burden of age and experience. Blowing up a PC at home is nothing against blowing up equipment and property of others in a second, worth bizarre amounts of... funds.

I really don`t care about bugs in early access, as severe as they might appear.

 I see the progress and a certain vision of the development and can distinguish developers from publishers, who each have their own ambitions to survive.

Time will tell, as allways.

Let them bugs coming! :D

BTW i can clear the registry on my own which gives me a minimum amount of responsibility while wrecking my own stuff....

Ha! Yeah, I'm not too concerned anymore.  I'm holding off on installing KSP2 again until.....  

Did "They" publish a fix yet?   Asking for a friend.

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AtomicTech

AtomicTech

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On 9/25/2023 at 1:52 PM, Royalswissarmyknife said:

Never deleted a game faster lol.

I literally had the exact same moment when I heard about it on Saturday morning  :joy:

Dude, at this point, I'm just gonna come back in a year or so and see if it's worth giving up my career gameplay lol

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Stoup

Stoup

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As much as I want to try and enjoy KSP2 in its current state, I'm not really willing to risk this kind of thing for it, I'm afraid. This is the uninstall line for me! I'll consider reinstalling maybe once some more substantial content is available.

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sturmhauke

sturmhauke

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On 9/25/2023 at 3:36 PM, herbal space program said:

So in the opinion of the programming experts around here, is this bug going to leave a lot of residual pollution in the Windows registry if the game is uninstalled? I don't even know how to look at that.

Ideally, uninstalling a Windows application will remove the relevant registry entries, perhaps with a prompt to the effect of "Do you want to remove your settings? Y/N" But lots of application uninstallers don't bother doing that. The nature of this bug (that is, the devs not properly understanding what the registry is for or how to use it) makes it almost certain that KSP2's uninstaller doesn't remove anything from the registry either.

So uninstalling KSP2 won't make anything worse, but the registry will remain full of unnecessary entries until someone cleans it up. It's like if you kick out a bad roommate and he leaves a bunch of junk behind. The junk is harmless (unless he was making drugs or something crazy like that), but it's also occupying space that you could use for something else. Now, this analogy breaks down a little bit because if you go rooting around in your registry deleting stuff without understanding, it would be like cleaning up that junk pile and also accidentally tearing up floorboards and cutting electrical wires and stuff. That can't easily happen when cleaning a house, but it can when cleaning the registry.

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sturmhauke

sturmhauke

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On 9/24/2023 at 12:34 PM, Kerbart said:

ARE THEY INSANE??!!

I know professional developers who recommend .ini files over the registry “so you can never get blamed for messing up the registry” and [snip] use it as if it where a Temp file?! And that is on top of gargantuan game save files? “Save files were getting too big so we're using the registry instead.” Wow. You couldn't come up with this when asked for a list of  “stupid things no developer ever should do” and yet here we are. I'm liquided they're wrecking the KSP legacy but now I'm  PO'd they're trying to wreck my PC as well.

This seems like a case of too many junior devs who don't understand the consequences of their code, and not enough senior engineers and/or QA support engineers doing code reviews, catching and reproducing low level bugs, or mentoring. Programming in general is hard, and game programming is very hard. Somebody in charge didn't take these kinds of problems seriously enough to properly allocate resources to them.

Sauce: I've been a software engineer for 10 years, partially overlapping with various roles in the game industry for 9 years. Outsiders love to blame individual devs, testers, etc., but it's generally a systemic problem - in other words, bad management.

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KerbolExplorer

KerbolExplorer

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On 9/24/2023 at 2:28 PM, cheese3660 said:

Update: On doing even more investigating, I have come to the conclusion that it is vestigial side effects of part of an editor tool that wasn't supposed to be in the game, and could easily just be removed

They really forgot the..... 

 #if UNITY_EDITOR
      //Code here for Editor only.
  #endif

 

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Kerb_

Kerb_

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On 9/25/2023 at 1:54 PM, Wahnfried said:

 I requested a refund after 1.8 hours of KSP2.

These 1.8 hours left 369 PQS Object State entries in my registry. I expect it to be resolved in a reasonable time.

Will we also get a bug fix?

mfg Wahnbert

If you got a refund, how do you suppose they redownload software on your computer? You're gonna have to do it yourself. 

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Guest paru paru

Guest paru paru

Posted
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On 9/27/2023 at 7:22 AM, RockyTV said:

뿌튀 인보 ,뿌튀 인보 작업 [FU] 인보 뿌튀 문의 t.me/FUON1

뿌튀 인보 ,뿌튀 인보 작업 [FU] 인보 뿌튀 문의 t.me/FUON1

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ChadDude

ChadDude

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As of today at 11am my time, the bug was fixed along with some classification from Dakota how it happened on the discord server for Intercept Games.

"from my understanding, writing the value to the registry was a step in a very old debugging workflow that just stuck around until thankfully everyone noticed it" 

 

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TwoCalories

TwoCalories

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Posted (edited)

How much playtime do you need for this to become an issue? I've got about 43.8 hours. Also, will this affect my PC or will the game just stop working?

And what happened to that 9-29 hotfix? Is it out yet?

Edited by TwoCalories
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Spicat

Spicat

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Posted (edited)
19 minutes ago, TwoCalories said:

How much playtime do you need for this to become an issue? I've got about 43.8 hours. Also, will this affect my PC or will the game just stop working?

And what happened to that 9-29 hotfix? Is it out yet?

You can check the registry yourself (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Intercept Games\Kerbal Space Program 2), if it has just a few line (around 70 lines), it's fixed!

But yes, the hotfix, which is out since friday, completely fixed it and cleaned the registry at the same time. This bug report will be soon archived, it's still there just in case some people still encounter this.

Edited by Spicat
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