KSA | The KSP Replacement from RocketWerkz | Seamless Movement and Terrain

[cubinator]

45 minutes ago, Deddly said:

Kapybaras confirmed??

The ultimate irony.

[AlphaMensae]

I'd love to see Kapybaras, but I wonder if this hype train is so amped up right now over the working title that Dean may find it very difficult to change from the cats some time from now.  

[Kerbart]

12 hours ago, Snips said:

At first glance it looks promising, but "once bitten, twice shy". Will keep an eye on it, it can't get worse then KSP2.

Oh please don't challenge them.

[Skorj]

On 10/31/2024 at 7:48 PM, PDCWolf said:

It's mind blowing to me that they'd be pursuing this in C#, never seen it used for a project in this scale or with this many potential complexities.

Oh, I have.  Even complex games are "mid" compared to large business projects.  But I do wonder what they mean when they say they created their own engine.  These days studios usually mean "a custom framework on top of Unreal", since re-inventing that particular wheel would be ... a bold plan.  C# would be a great choice for a scalable framework built of top of letting Unreal do the crunchy bits, but they seem to be saying they started from scratch?  I'm less hopeful for this project if that's the case.  I've only ever seen studios crater after thinking they should crate a new engine (anyone remember Flagship?).

Still, first time for everything.  I'm cheering for them, either way.

[Mr. Kerbin]

3 hours ago, AlphaMensae said:

I'd love to see Kapybaras, but I wonder if this hype train is so amped up right now over the working title that Dean may find it very difficult to change from the cats some time from now.  

It still would be KSA, ya know. 
 

3 hours ago, AlphaMensae said:

hype train

Hmmm…

[kerbiloid]

Meanwhile, the future (astrocats? kittenauts?) are training.

Spoiler

 

 

[Skorj]

I would have gone with "Goblin Space Agency", leaning into the early "found in a junkyard" spirit of KSP parts.

[Dinlink]

I second the Capybara mascot concept xD... And there are good Capybara astronaut art out there to take inspiration. Like:

From @chiguilouis Instagram artist.

Capybaras make cute little mascot for space fering simulator xD

[TechieV]

17 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

I'm sure when we mod in Kerbals in place of Cats (or whatever it ends up being, Capybaras?), it'll be what KSP2 should've probably been. They haven't revealed any long term plans so far that I know of.

I mean, if there's anything I learned from the disaster that was KSP2, it was to not get your hopes too high. I'm not that hopeful for the game cuz all we got was a video showing CBs.

[Snips]

16 hours ago, AlphaMensae said:

First, Felipe (HarvesteR) is indeed involved as a developer. This project started back in July when Dean tweeted a photo of him and Felipe together. Dean had been working on his custom game engine for a while already, and with what happened with KSP2, I think there was a mutual desire to make the true KSP successor, and so they started on the "KSP-like game" that Felipe had expressed a desire to make.

Second, Take2 is not involved. Enough said/.

Also, Twitch streamer and giant GSP fan EJ_SA said yesterday on stream that he has been working as a consultant to Dean & Co. ever since the project began, and in fact personally steered former KSP1 and KSP2 devs to Dean. We only know a few of the names, there are others that have not been announced yet..

Oh, third: Dean is a coder, Nate was just an artist. Who do you want leading a project like this?

First: Time will tell. Let's wait for a real gameplay presentation, up to this point it's mostly idle speculation or reading tea leaves.

Second: Praise the lord. I'm not against big publishers in general, but the Take2 actions in the past concerning KSP2 were not the proper way to behave.

And third: I'm absolutely on your side. You need a coder in charge, not an artist.

[Bej Kerman]

Dean Hall, CEO and one of the developers on this, has said to maintain a healthy skepticism. But just to instill some hope in those who are still doomeristic over KSP 2: unlike Star Theory, RW isn't being pulled left and right on a low budget by upper management, and they're demonstrating an understanding of the challenges posed by this game. It's just a techdemo, yeah. But it is more meaningful than flashy marketing, and Dean Hall has said so much they want a solid framework first rather than bolting things on like Harvester did with KSP until technical debt becomes too great to manage.

So far they've also demonstrated running two physics simulations simultaneously in the same scene that can run at different tick rates. If you haven't figured out what that means for KSA: people hoped KSP 2 would LOD physics so that large vessels don't hog your CPU's runtime, and Uber/StarTheory/Intercept never bothered with it. KSA's framework is already being designed with this in mind.

Lastly, Rocketwerkz has did Stationeers and several other successful projects, and they hired lots of people who've had a history developing KSP 1/2 and mods for it... including Harvester, someone that I expect a lot of people here would trust with their lives. So even if this is a massive undertaking, they are going in with far more experience than "yeah, we're the studio who made Planetary Annihilation and not much else". 

[Alpha_star]

Honestly I'm not really a fan of the "KSRSS" style solar system. Games with their own systems work better for me and almost any space simulator game did just that (except for Oribiter, SR1 and SFS), while their communities can always make a real solar system mod by themselves.

Anyways this whole concept is still pretty neat, at least we've got yet another  (at least to some degree) official sequal to the original Kerbal Space Program. May this franchise lives long and prosper.

[Bej Kerman]

1 minute ago, Alpha_star said:

Honestly I'm not really a fan of the "KSRSS" style solar system.

Real data is being used for these tech demos because it's easier to tell when something's wrong. Dean Hall has said the fictional system they plan on setting the game in (if the stock game doesn't feature interstellar; he has said the game is being made to handle interstellar should modders want to add different systems) will be somewhere between 1/10th scale like stock KSP and 1/4th scale.

[PDCWolf]

8 hours ago, Skorj said:

Oh, I have.  Even complex games are "mid" compared to large business projects.  But I do wonder what they mean when they say they created their own engine.  These days studios usually mean "a custom framework on top of Unreal", since re-inventing that particular wheel would be ... a bold plan.  C# would be a great choice for a scalable framework built of top of letting Unreal do the crunchy bits, but they seem to be saying they started from scratch?  I'm less hopeful for this project if that's the case.  I've only ever seen studios crater after thinking they should crate a new engine (anyone remember Flagship?).

Still, first time for everything.  I'm cheering for them, either way.

The post I quoted from them reads

Quote

 

"We have been working on custom technology to allow us to build games that really scale for some time now. This is called the BRUTAL Framework which is similar in approach to the older XNA Framework. The desciption:

BRUTAL is a C# game framework that is designed to be complicated, slow, and difficult to use."

So I take it they've taken XNA and 'looked at' their homework and built up from there.

2 hours ago, TechieV said:

I mean, if there's anything I learned from the disaster that was KSP2, it was to not get your hopes too high. I'm not that hopeful for the game cuz all we got was a video showing CBs.

Blanket statements are always bad. You shouldn't get your hopes up if all you're shown is hype and not the technical background to make those work. With KSP2 it was always smoke and mirrors and they could never talk about anything technical, save for the heating blog, which the only thing they had to show for it was paint drawings. That was a huge red flag and it flew under a lot of people's radars.

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Dean Hall, CEO and one of the developers on this, has said to maintain a healthy skepticism.

I think my skepticism comes from two places: 1. Icarus is hot garbage, and 2. Stationeers has been for the best part of a decade in Early Access and they never even bothered showing a roadmap, it feels like it's a forgotten project they throw some feature in when they remember about it.

8 minutes ago, Alpha_star said:

Honestly I'm not really a fan of the "KSRSS" style solar system.

They're using Solar System data because it already exist and is apparently easy to import into their system for quick testing. You can clearly see they've also scaled it down to KSP neutron-star densities.

[Bej Kerman]

14 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

1. Icarus is hot garbage, and 2. Stationeers has been for the best part of a decade in Early Access

Both have 'very positive' ratings on Steam, so clearly they're doing something right, even if a minority of people hate them [shrug]

17 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

they never even bothered showing a roadmap, it feels like it's a forgotten project they throw some feature in when they remember about it.

I'm inclined to think there's a little hyperbole here, especially given people were happy with Squad, under ownership by Take Two, delivering a half-complete art pass and fireworks to KSP 1 rather than any major improvements.

 

My skepticism comes from the fact that many people have made space games, but none have really broken the mould like KSP 1, and right now Rocketwerkz is facing challenges that haven't been solved before.  The Rocketwerkz devs that made Stationeers aren't the only people working on this though, as I said, quite a few devs on this also worked with KSP 1/2 and will be familiar with the challenges posed here. In particular, Harvester who figured out how to simulate interplanetary motion and physics with reasonable stability inside a game engine whose framework started out as a 20km or so square of flat terrain to fly tiny rockets in. So if you don't believe this is any reason to think the game should succeed, it is  reason to not be as pessimistic as some are here. Yeah, you were hurt by KSP 2, but that was in the past; this is entirely detached from the AAA games industry and so far there aren't any early warning signs to indicate that the developers are clueless and faffing around struggling to solve basic problems KSP 1 already solved, like in the case of Star Theory trying to make KSP 2.

[Kerbart]

10 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

My skepticism comes from the fact that many people have made space games, but none have really broken the mould like KSP 1, and right now Rocketwerkz is facing challenges that haven't been solved before.  […] this is entirely detached from the AAA games industry and so far there aren't any early warning signs to indicate that the developers are clueless and faffing around struggling to solve basic problems KSP 1 already solved, like in the case of Star Theory trying to make KSP 2.

You make good points, and I agree on tempered optimism as in “well it’s not a disaster yet”

We can already see a difference in approach with KSP2,where the emphasis was on features (most didn’t make it into the game) where RW seems, for now at least, very focused on getting the mechanics right.

And while they have no insider knowledge on KSP2 development I’m sure important lessons were learned from how certain elements were received by the community. They have in-house talent and experience, Felipe brings in experience on the things that make physics baed space games hard… on paper it looks good, now we just neee to give it time.

 

[PDCWolf]

35 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Both have 'very positive' ratings on Steam

Icarus was actually mostly positive, until they finished their DLC releasing cycle, pushing the price of the full experience from $17 (in my region) to $94, $41 if you don't mind the cosmetics (yes, that's $36 of cosmetic DLC for a game that's $17, and by SteamDB, those prises are +64% for normal US Dollar, madness.). Plus calling them "expansions" was very controversial compared to the content they bring in. Mind you all of that was without emitting a single judgement on whether I think the game is good or bad, which I've already stated before. Not like trusting Steam reviews is any indication of intelligence.

41 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

quite a few devs on this also worked with KSP 1/2 and will be familiar with the challenges posed here. In particular, Harvester who figured out how to simulate interplanetary motion and physics with reasonable stability inside a game engine whose framework started out as a 20km or so square of flat terrain to fly tiny rockets in.

Yeah, having the KSP1 team, and part of the KSP2 team is a -huge- boost on experience, not just on systems and mechanics... but on knowing how to do and not to do things. They all got to watch KSP2 and cringe at it, some from inside even.

[Alpha_star]

Just a quick speculation: a mod that changes the kitten into Kerbals will come out almost immediately after release.

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

Not like trusting Steam reviews is any indication of intelligence.

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

Yeah, having the KSP1 team, and part of the KSP2 team is a -huge- boost on experience, not just on systems and mechanics... but on knowing how to do and not to do things. They all got to watch KSP2 and cringe at it, some from inside even.

That's precisely my point. RW isn't floundering about, and it's certainly more transparent than Intercept was with its occasional posts showing novelties or saying "We can render orbits! We can do collisions!", which in hindsight was obviously because they never actually bothered to make any real progress on features like shipment routes or colony building, and these basic elementary features were the most they'd actually got done in the midst of mismanagement while being unable to actually ask Squad how they done or fixed certain things.

Edited November 2 by Bej Kerman

[Sea_Kerman]

 

[PDCWolf]

4 hours ago, Sea_Kerman said:

-snip-

They mention:

• Jolt physics - Mentioned before but yeah, they're not using physX, havoc or other known prepackaged physics for this.
• Robotic parts - "Our robotic parts are gonna be more stable..." - 0:58
• Layered physics, "Keplerian > Simple > Detailed", where keplerians are used for orbits, simple physics for "when nobody watches" (unloaded vessels? they mention simple colliders, rigid bodies, bounding boxes as examples of simple stuff) and Jolt detailed physics kick in for focused stuff. "we might not even need to do this, Jolt might be performant enough" - From 2:30
• Multithreaded - 4:20 - "I thought it was gonna be harder to multithread it."
• "Interstellar" - 4:53 - Mentioned as part of how they can go the other way with more complex physics layers. "The advantage is we don't have a game scene like Unity or Unreal, we have no context like a traditional app to do anything. You've seen our simulation [...] we pass a delta time and simulate a hundred thousand years like that [...] We get to abstract stuff out."
• "We're learning from the mistakes of the past" - 8:40 - Arguably the best feature.

Edited November 2 by PDCWolf

[Kerbart]

3 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

They mention:

• Jolt physics, Robotic parts, Layered physics, Multithreaded, "Interstellar", "We're learning from the mistakes of the past"

Nate mentioned a lot of things too, and had plenty of animations to go with it,  Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the design team signals they're aware of performance challenges and want to build something up from the ground. But until there's an actual product to show, that's a story we've been told before. So it's great that this is happening but nothing to get too hyped up about.

[Fizzlebop Smith]

12 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Icarus was actually mostly positive, until they finished their DLC releasing cycle, pushing the price of the full experience from $17 (in my region) to $94, $41 if you don't mind the cosmetics (yes, that's $36 of cosmetic DLC for a game that's $17, and by SteamDB, those prises are +64% for normal US Dollar, madness.). Plus calling them "expansions" was very controversial compared to the content they bring in. Mind you all of that was without emitting a single judgement on whether I think the game is good or bad, which I've already stated before. Not like trusting Steam reviews is any indication of intelligence.

Yeah, having the KSP1 team, and part of the KSP2 team is a -huge- boost on experience, not just on systems and mechanics... but on knowing how to do and not to do things. They all got to watch KSP2 and cringe at it, some from inside even.

Hey Bej has found a game he doesn't hate, let 'em have a moment to sniff the Hopium.  Its being shared here bc they don't have official forums.

[Lisias]

3 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Nate mentioned a lot of things too, and had plenty of animations to go with it,  Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the design team signals they're aware of performance challenges and want to build something up from the ground. But until there's an actual product to show, that's a story we've been told before. So it's great that this is happening but nothing to get too hyped up about.

They are learning from the mistakes of the past at the same time they are venturing where no one ventured before - i.e., ditching the 3d engine and coding their own, where a lot of that lessons would not apply...

Don't take me wrong - I want them to succeed, such an engine can make things very, very interesting. On the most positive way.

But at a cost: modders will have to learn their engine, ditching decades of knowledge and know-how - you can't have the cake and eat it too. And the knowledge gathered about this new engine will not be useful anywhere else, what probably will limit the modders willing to work with it. What may be not a bad thing in the long run, but will surely present some drawbacks on the short.

It's a bold move, that can pay back highly. But higher stakes come with higher risks. And hyping high risking endeavours usually isn't the best of the business models.

I would suggest taking a very close look on Orbiter's source code - and, Life isn't interesting?, we would have gone full cycle!

 

[Skorj]

7 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

• "Interstellar" - 4:53 - Mentioned as part of how they can go the other way with more complex physics layers. "The advantage is we don't have a game scene like Unity or Unreal, we have no context like a traditional app to do anything. You've seen our simulation [...] we pass a delta time and simulate a hundred thousand years like that [...] We get to abstract stuff out."
• "We're learning from the mistakes of the past" - 8:40 - Arguably the best feature.

This stuff gives me hope.  If you can't skip time arbitrarily forward, you can't scale to huge numbers of ships in orbit.

3 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Nate mentioned a lot of things too, and had plenty of animations to go with it,  Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the design team signals they're aware of performance challenges and want to build something up from the ground. But until there's an actual product to show, that's a story we've been told before. So it's great that this is happening but nothing to get too hyped up about.

We've all been hurt before.  No hype, but hope.