Nate Simpson and the core KSP2 creative team should be rehired by the new owners

[PDCWolf]

34 minutes ago, Lisias said:

But still, at this point, heavily criticizing the thing as a full product is moot because:

1. or the damned thing is really dead, and so we would be kicking a dead horse
2. or the new owners are going to reboot it, and so any criticizing is a waste of time because the whole thing would is going be reworked

Oh I fully get you, believe me on that... yet there's also clear support for the belief that the game can be picked up and continued from where it was left off... Some people really do believe such a thing is possible.

[Lisias]

56 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Oh I fully get you, believe me on that... yet there's also clear support for the belief that the game can be picked up and continued from where it was left off... Some people really do believe such a thing is possible.

Well, it's not impossible.

Rightnow, anyone openly affirming that KSP will not be reworked is exercising wishful thinking as much as anyone affirming it will.

It's just out of our hand and without further information, both possibilities are plain 50%/50% at this point.

[Pthigrivi]

I'd love if some of the folks who worked on KSP2 found their way into further development just like I'm happy some of the previous folks have found their way to KSA, if for no other reason than they're some of the few people on the planet who have worked on these same problems. I'd also love if they saved themselves some time by carrying over the 3d assets. The parts themselves and the kerbals and animations, new planets (hopefully with a bit more surface detail down the road) were really fantastic. It was mainly the lighting and fonts that needed work. The lighting was particularly bad and I think thats what most folks who didn't like the look are actually reacting to. I continue to find the hate fest against Nate really silly and meanspirited, as most of the things that were great were in his main bailiwick and most of the decisions that actually doomed the game were made above his head. I guess thats just the streetlight effect in action. 

What I really hope is that if by some miracle KSP2 does get resurrected or merged with KSA that the baby isn't thrown out with the bathwater. The tone was great and Id really still love to see colonies and resources made into something real. 

Edited January 14 by Pthigrivi

[boolybooly]

With graphics I feel like KSP2 is too shiney too soon.

KSP1 took a decade to develope and the graphics morphed significantly, part models, textures, effects, buildings and terrain. It started out rough and got quite smooth and IMHO that is what KSP2 should do, only in the game, start out in a barn with small parts and rusty, dented textures. Move up to a disused airfield with weeds growing in cracks in concrete etc.

Graphically KSP2 drops you straight into peak hype with burnished gloss coated parts and a massive launch complex, consequently the only way is down, should start at the bottom and build your way up.

Also parts should show scorching if they have been though plasma that kind of thing, to add a bit of character and history to vessels in play. 

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, boolybooly said:

With graphics I feel like KSP2 is too shiney too soon.

KSP1 took a decade to develope and the graphics morphed significantly, part models, textures, effects, buildings and terrain. It started out rough and got quite smooth and IMHO that is what KSP2 should do, only in the game, start out in a barn with small parts and rusty, dented textures. Move up to a disused airfield with weeds growing in cracks in concrete etc.

Graphically KSP2 drops you straight into peak hype with burnished gloss coated parts and a massive launch complex, consequently the only way is down, should start at the bottom and build your way up.

Also parts should show scorching if they have been though plasma that kind of thing, to add a bit of character and history to vessels in play. 

Yeah it was never exactly clear whether building/launch complex tiers were ever planned, which makes me think they weren't. I don't mind the parts all having a more or less compatible look through the tech tree but scorching might've been cool. As it was you could affect the shininess with sliders but unfortunately the lighting really wasn't quite there. Maybe that's something Blackrack could have helped on, sucks he never had the chance to follow through.  Even if the parts coming out the other end were cleaned up it would have been cool to start in an aircraft boneyard and slowly build it up to a polished complex. That was always a bit of a controversial idea on the forum but I thought it would have been a satisfying touch. 

 

[chefsbrian]

3 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Yeah it was never exactly clear whether building/launch complex tiers were ever planned, which makes me think they weren't.

This was more or less my expectation, as the 'improved' launch complexes and buildings would be colonies. Pressing a button and upgrading the KSC wouldn't mean much compared to adding modules to your Minmus base. Alas, a vision that'll likely never come to pass in the games we have available.

[herbal space program]

10 hours ago, Dakitess said:

I don't see any way for KSP2 to be limited by the fact that it should run on basic rig : just lower some parameters as we all do in other game, including very demanding one.

KSP2's performance issues had precious little to do with graphics AFAICT, at least on my machine. I could max all the settings out or tank them, and still I'd get exactly the same pokey frame rate with high part counts. There were fundamental flaws in the physics engine that made it calculate the state of the craft way too slowly on each tick of the state machine. Also there were weird non-local effects, where having multiple craft flying in the same SOI, even if they were on rails, would bog down the focused vessel.

[Dakitess]

7 hours ago, herbal space program said:

KSP2's performance issues had precious little to do with graphics AFAICT, at least on my machine. I could max all the settings out or tank them, and still I'd get exactly the same pokey frame rate with high part counts. There were fundamental flaws in the physics engine that made it calculate the state of the craft way too slowly on each tick of the state machine. Also there were weird non-local effects, where having multiple craft flying in the same SOI, even if they were on rails, would bog down the focused vessel.

Yup, fair enough, but then my point remains the same : good graphics would not be an issue of any kind, since it's not the bottleneck, and whenever it becomes, you can lower the parameters with generally dramatic effect on perf, until... Again the very badly coded physic is the bottleneck again, on the CPU.

@Lisias I don't get it : of course i'm judging the game based on what it shown in its EA state since it's the only thing that we have. And of course I'm knowing that it "could" have improved, graphics wise, and I guess that it "would", to some extent. But as I said, it's not only a matter of time to make things better but also artistical choices. Let say that it's all personal and then focus on the technical part : sure, it's in EA. But priced as a full game. And it became an EA only at the very end, it's was not advertised as such before. And I think that we can all agree on the fact that, EA or not, it was deceivingly poor and the dynamic was not showing much improvements in that department with some cruel limitation imputed to the game engine itself and the dev saying they won't do any miracle about it... Like, we all knew that time would not have helped to get a "good" looking KSP2, only a "better looking" one along the years of dev, nah ?

I guess it's enough for some, maybe for most. I feel that it's very frustrating. We would not have any kind of KSP3 before 2040 and the KSP2 would already look meh, at best with basically not hope to get THE KSP next-gen game with gorgeous scenery, up to date technically, yet able to run on basic rig by lowering graphics ? Why should we be "OK" for that, just because it's KSP ? It can take time to get better, i'm fine with that. But not with a totally compromised and limited core foundation that won't allow for proper good environment, performance, and all.

[cocoscacao]

4 hours ago, Dakitess said:

sure, it's in EA. But priced as a full game. And it became an EA...

But it's still an EA. Blah blah, badly handled, blah blah price. Still an EA. Officially unfinished product.

Edited Wednesday at 01:33 PM by cocoscacao

[Dakitess]

If you're fine with that, go ahead, I'm not

[PDCWolf]

2 hours ago, cocoscacao said:

But it's still an EA. Blah blah, badly handled, blah blah price. Still an EA. Officially unfinished product.

They did not, at any single point, mention the artstyle, the UI, the 'look' of the game as EA placeholders. As far as we know we got the complete vision on the artstyle and the look they were going for is the one that was already there, bar some suboptimal stuff like the antialiasing issues (which they mentioned were gonna fix someday), the terrain engine (also mentioned as going to be fixed one day), and the rendering engine, which was touted more as a performance fix with some domino effects on lighting, but still, not a change to the graphic style and artistic vision.

So no, in this particular case, being an EA has nothing to do with what's being criticized since they were clearly not gonna change anything related to the artstyle or visuals.

[Lisias]

7 hours ago, Dakitess said:

@Lisias I don't get it : of course i'm judging the game based on what it shown in its EA state since it's the only thing that we have. And of course I'm knowing that it "could" have improved, graphics wise, and I guess that it "would", to some extent.

Well, I can only quote myself:

On 1/14/2025 at 11:52 AM, Lisias said:

But heavily criticizing the state of the art of a Early Access game is plain nuts in my book.

We should be criticizing the former owners of the IP by not being able to proper develop the thing? For sure. But this is not what we are doing now, are we?

<....>

But still, at this point, heavily criticizing the thing as a full product is moot because:

1. or the damned thing is really dead, and so we would be kicking a dead horse
2. or the new owners are going to reboot it, and so any criticizing is a waste of time because the whole thing would is going be reworked

 

7 hours ago, Dakitess said:

Let say that it's all personal and then focus on the technical part : sure, it's in EA. But priced as a full game.

This is the reason I advocate for a wider window for refunds. Pricing is a problem to be solved on a different level of the food chain.

 

7 hours ago, Dakitess said:

And it became an EA only at the very end, it's was not advertised as such before.

It was being advertised as EA at the moment of the sale?

 

7 hours ago, Dakitess said:

And I think that we can all agree on the fact that, EA or not, it was deceivingly poor and the dynamic was not showing much improvements in that department with some cruel limitation imputed to the game engine itself and the dev saying they won't do any miracle about it...

The engine has limitations, but it was not the main factor of the problem. There's very good looking games around using Unity, I think this argument is moot.

 

7 hours ago, Dakitess said:

Like, we all knew that time would not have helped to get a "good" looking KSP2, only a "better looking" one along the years of dev, nah ?

Wrong. Completely, absolutely wrong. The following game is also made on Unity:

Spoiler

I have a lot of disagreements about how Unity do things under the bonnet, and good looking graphics is not one of them. Granted, there's way better looking engines around, but from the "good enough" point of view, this is not a problem.

 

11 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

They did not, at any single point, mention the artstyle, the UI, the 'look' of the game as EA placeholders. As far as we know we got the complete vision on the artstyle and the look they were going for is the one that was already there, bar some suboptimal stuff like the antialiasing issues (which they mentioned were gonna fix someday), the terrain engine (also mentioned as going to be fixed one day), and the rendering engine, which was touted more as a performance fix with some domino effects on lighting, but still, not a change to the graphic style and artistic vision.

Nope. We have word that they lost their GPU specialist due the crescent IA companies yanking all the workforce they can.

From all KSP2 problems, "fixing" the graphics is going to be the most straightforward - as soon as someone capable is hired for the job.

 

13 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

So no, in this particular case, being an EA has nothing to do with what's being criticized since they were clearly not gonna change anything related to the artstyle or visuals.

At this point, any criticizing as a product is moot, because that damned thing is stalled in EA right now, and it's highly unfeasible the new owner will fix everything in 6 months.

And I agree there's a huge amount of things to be fixed - the worst of them, not technical.

[cocoscacao]

4 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

They did not, at any single point, mention the artstyle, the UI, the 'look' of the game as EA placeholders. As far as we know we got the complete vision on the artstyle and the look they were going for is the one that was already there, bar some suboptimal stuff like the antialiasing issues (which they mentioned were gonna fix someday), the terrain engine (also mentioned as going to be fixed one day), and the rendering engine, which was touted more as a performance fix with some domino effects on lighting, but still, not a change to the graphic style and artistic vision.

Art style and technical inefficiencies are two different things.

Edit:

Take Dishonored 2 for example. At launch, it was an unoptimized mess and resource hog. Over time, they patched things up. The art-style remained the same (duh), but game started performing better. Was it the art-style issue? No. The game was unoptimized. I have a few issues with KSP 2 art-style, sure (fonts & other minor things), but KSP 2 still is (a very bad) EA. Thus, unfinished, unoptimized, with lots of room for improvement. But overall, it's art-style is fine for me.

Edited Wednesday at 08:44 PM by cocoscacao

[Dakitess]

@Lisias I get what you say, and can understand your point.

But. What matter is... Do you truly (sincerely) believe(d) of substantial graphics improvement, by the time KSP2 was still running ? Yes, I get it, it was an EA and some work was planned to make it better looking : the contrary would have been plain dumb and not logical, of course. But I guess we don't speak of a 30% enhancement, right ? What would have make KSP2 a good looking game, is something like 100-200% improvements when it comes to aesthetic, technic, graphics wise, to me. There were really a LOT to do to get something "correct" and worth a KSP2 holding a new decade, basically.

So my question is, based on what we've seen of they dynamic, and not talking about the last months of falling down completely, rather the initial and best pace of the EA, do you truly believe that the game would have enhance enough, graphics wise ? I really really don't believe it myself, by a good margin. Like, really. And then it does not really matters about that EA thing : be it in EA or not, my personal guess is that it would not have evolved anywhere near it needed to be in 3-4 years of full dev time. Sooooo, yeah, I consider KSP2 definitely lacking  ALOT when it comes to aesthetic, and again, i'm not (only) speaking about Artistic choices but more about the game being completely outdated, betting on wrong tech, with a lot of laziness and poor hope of anything coming to a good end.

I'm very genuinely surprised that people find it good enough, it's not a rant or anything but rather really some surprise that "it's fiiiiiiine, it's KSP...". Yeah, well...

[Lisias]

On 1/16/2025 at 6:04 AM, Dakitess said:

@Lisias I get what you say, and can understand your point.

But. What matter is... Do you truly (sincerely) believe(d) of substantial graphics improvement, by the time KSP2 was still running ?

I'm not a believer. I don't guess (most of the time), I measure. I think like an engineer (most of the time).

So, yeah, it's absolutely obvious that the graphics could be improved once they hire specialized workforce to work on it again and would be willing to spend the money on the task.

There's absolutely no technical impediment to improve graphics. The possible hindrances are all in the political and economical level.

 

On 1/16/2025 at 6:04 AM, Dakitess said:

I'm very genuinely surprised that people find it good enough, it's not a rant or anything but rather really some surprise that "it's fiiiiiiine, it's KSP...". Yeah, well...

You are going to be surprised a lot in the next months.

I'm playing currently KSP 1.4.3 without any graphics enhancements (not even EVE), and I'm enjoying it. Heck, I would buy it now if I would haven't yet.

Check the Steam Survey. Essentially 34.64% of the Steam users have a GPU with 6GB VRAM or less (12.11% with 6GB, and a interesting 7.73% on 4GB). So any game aiming to 8GB as minimum automatically lost 1/3 of the potential audience just because of it.  If I would set a target for a new game I hope to be sold to most gamers possible, I would try set the minimum target to be 4GB VRAM to maximize my chances to sell the damn thing - and still, I would loose about 14.8% of the audience as they still use 3GB or less.

Fun fact: users on 512MB VRAM are increasing. More interesting yet, this specific group increased by 0.49%, statistically more than the growth of all GPUs with 10GB or more! Believe it or not, there're more users on 512MB VRAM on December 2024 than on the previous survey, and they are the group with more growth than anything else. People that ditched GPUs between 1 and 8 GB literally split in 2 more or less equal groups, with half going back to 512MB and the other half further splitting on the bigger cards.

So, on the bottom line, it really doesn't matter so much if we can improve KSP2 graphics or not. What will really matter is if we can reduce the minimum target to at least 4GB without compromising what we already have. THIS will be the challenge an hypothetical new team will need to face.

Steam had in 2024 about 69 million active users, and it's estimated that they represent 75% of the market share in USA (in EU, it's about 80%!). If Steam is 75% and have 69M users, we can estimate the total game market to be about 92M users.

Assuming the Steam Survey may be extrapolated to the whole Word with an acceptable degree of accuracy, by lowering the minumum GPU target to 4GB would allow about 19.84% (7.73% + 12.11%) more users to play it, or about 92*0.1984 = 18,2528M of users in potential.

It was told that TTWO intended to sell 100.000 copies of the game on launch, but sold "only" 80.000. If we could rewind the launch and try it again today, had they targeted a 4GB minimum VRAM, they could had reached about ~95.872 copies sold - of course, assuming a normal distribution of interested gamers  over the GPU landscape. Heck, in Jun 2023, the most popular GPU was a 1060 with 4GB VRAM.

So, on the bottom line, what we can do to improve KSP2 graphics is essentially counter productive on the current market. We should be discussing what we can do to reduce the minimum specs.

Edited Saturday at 02:03 AM by Lisias
Fixing some late night math... :P

[PDCWolf]

4 hours ago, Lisias said:

Fun fact: users on 512MB VRAM are increasing. More interesting yet, this specific group increased by 0.49%, statistically more than the growth of all GPUs with 10GB or more! Believe it or not, there're more users on 512MB VRAM on December 2024 than on the previous survey, and they are the group with more growth than anything else. People that ditched GPUs between 1 and 8 GB literally split in 2 more or less equal groups, with half going back to 512MB and the other half further splitting on the bigger cards.

Be mindful that the specific vram chart is a bit... affected by the fact that APUs and other integrated graphic chips... as the new snapdragons (slowly but surely) share arbitrary amounts of ram with the integrated graphics. The low end of that chart is a mess to read due to this, which is why most reference the GPU chart itself rather than the VRAM.

[Scarecrow71]

4 hours ago, Lisias said:

There's absolutely no technical impediment to improve graphics.

Apart from hardware, that is.  I mean, take the graphics from a 9th gen game and try running it on a 1st gen console.  Being able to improve the graphics does not necessarily mean you have the actual hardware needed to run them.  Now, I agree that hardware wasn't (or at least shouldn't have been) KSP2's issue, which makes your statement true from that perspective.  But you have to take hardware into account when determining whether or not it is feasible to update graphics.

[Lisias]

3 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Be mindful that the specific vram chart is a bit... affected by the fact that APUs and other integrated graphic chips... as the new snapdragons (slowly but surely) share arbitrary amounts of ram with the integrated graphics. The low end of that chart is a mess to read due to this, which is why most reference the GPU chart itself rather than the VRAM.

I don't think so. These Some*** integrated graphics report themselves as having their max limit on "VRAM". I have a Old Potato with Intel HD 4000 with 100% of the "VRAM" stoled from the CPU, and it reports itself as having 1536MB:

OS: Mac OS X 10.14.6
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz (8)
RAM: 16384
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 4000 OpenGL Engine (1536MB)
SM: 46 (OpenGL 4.1 INTEL-12.10.31)
RT Formats: ARGB32, Depth, ARGBHalf, Shadowmap, RGB565, ARGB4444, ARGB1555, Default, ARGB2101010, DefaultHDR, ARGB64, ARGBFloat, RGFloat, RGHalf, RFloat, RHalf, R8, ARGBInt, RGInt, RInt, RGB111110Float, RG32, RGBAUShort, RG16

I will fire KSP on my Steam Deck and see what it says.

3 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Apart from hardware, that is.  <...>

Hardware is a limitation factor, no doubt. But not an hindrance.

See what EVE did for old potatoes.

=== == POST EDIT == ===

*** He's right about APUs. This is what I get from my Steam Deck:

OS: Linux 6.1 Steam Runtime 2 64bit
CPU: AMD Custom APU 0405 (8)
RAM: 14814
GPU: AMD Custom GPU 0405 (vangogh, LLVM 15.0.7, DRM 3.54, 6.1.52-valve16-1-neptune-61) (636MB)
SM: 50 (OpenGL 4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 23.1.3 (git-87ebaf765d))
RT Formats: ARGB32, Depth, ARGBHalf, Shadowmap, RGB565, ARGB4444, ARGB1555, Default, ARGB2101010, DefaultHDR, ARGB64, ARGBFloat, RGFloat, RGHalf, RFloat, RHalf, R8, ARGBI

He's reporting the memory used at the moment, not the max possible memory as HD 4000 above.

This is an EXCELLENT explanation for GPUs with 512MB being on the rise!!

Interesting enough, Steam Deck have 16GB of RAM, why only 14.814MB is being reported?

Edited Thursday at 06:08 PM by Lisias
POST EDIT

[Scarecrow71]

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

Hardware is a limitation factor, no doubt. But not an hindrance.

It's a hindrance until you have the right hardware.  The literal definition of hindrance:

a thing that provides resistance, delay, or obstruction to something or someone:

[Jacke]

I have a gaming laptop from ~2012 with the NVIDIA 765M chipset.  No new drivers for years and 2GB VRAM.  My hardware ain't going to be changing for a long while.  If a game can't run on that, I just won't buy and play it.

[PDCWolf]

47 minutes ago, Jacke said:

I have a gaming laptop from ~2012 with the NVIDIA 765M chipset.  No new drivers for years and 2GB VRAM.  My hardware ain't going to be changing for a long while.  If a game can't run on that, I just won't buy and play it.

Yet you'd be a reasonable person and not expect a heavy physics simulation game be targeted for 12 years old mid tier hardware on a limited wattage spec such as a laptop... would you?

[Lisias]

3 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Yet you'd be a reasonable person and not expect a heavy physics simulation game be targeted for 12 years old mid tier hardware on a limited wattage spec such as a laptop... would you?

Of course he will. Any reasonable person will expect to get the most value possible from whatever they have at hands. It's not up to them to know how software can be limited by hardware, this is what we are paid for!

Our job is to manage the user's expectations, not dictate them!

 

On 1/16/2025 at 5:36 PM, Scarecrow71 said:

It's a hindrance until you have the right hardware.  The literal definition of hindrance:

a thing that provides resistance, delay, or obstruction to something or someone:

Exactly. Hardware is not an hindrance to get better graphics. Again, see EVE that is doing exactly that for years already.

You see, "better graphics" doesn't means ray tracing neither 4k.

[Scarecrow71]

10 hours ago, Lisias said:

Exactly. Hardware is not an hindrance to get better graphics.

Did you intentionally skip over the part where I mentioned to try running current graphics on ancient hardware?  Because that's my entire point.  Hardware is a hindrance to better graphics.  We can't run better graphics on bad hardware.

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Did you intentionally skip over the part where I mentioned to try running current graphics on ancient hardware?

No. I graciously and politely ignored my argument being bending into something I didn't intended to.

My line of arguing is crystal clear, it started on this post and had a follow up on this one.

IN ABSOLUTELY NO WAY I was talking about running running KSP2 on 3DFX Voodoo or Nvidia Riva 128 on a Transmeta Crusoe powered portable. I'm talking about running KSP2 on 4GB GPUs cards that are still a very significant user base on Steam, damnit. Read the damned Steam Survey. Heck, the most popular GPU in June 2023 (a few months after KSP2 Launch) was a 1060 with 4GB VRAM. I'm talking about contemporaneous still in use hardware.

That said, trying to run KSP 1.0 an old AMD Athlon II X3 of mine with a Radeon HD 3850 looks like an appealing exercise right now. Heck, I'm wondering right now if it would be possible to shrink one of the firsts 0.x releases on a P5 or P6 machine running a dual 12Mb Voodoo2 in SLI...

Anyway... You are free to disagree with me, and experience taught me that it's not impossible you could be right (besides highly improbable at this point). But it will help a lot to keep my arguments in context.

This discussion started about my analysis and conclusion that KSP2 would be hugely beneficied by lowering the minimum specs to a 4GB class GPU, and other than mentioning that 14.8% (more probably 10 to 11%, as apparently Vangogh APUs are being counted as 512Mb...) of the potential user base are running under 3GB or less, I made absolutely not other statement about anything lower then 4GB GPUs (with the addendum that APUs are probably to be take seriously from now on).

[Dakitess]

Whatever the graphics max level as long as you can lower the settings to match a reasonable part of the players, a thing that the KSP2 OG game itself failed to respect, while being ugly, so...

Yeah, I don't even remember why we would discuss about a game to *not* be "too beautiful" because of hardware limitation : just need to make sure to get settings like any nowadays game. I can run Hogwarts Legacy on crappy laptop if I reduce the resolution accordingly, as well as all the various settings. Then people with low end can run the game and are happy while the one who actually "invest" a lot more in their rig, got something to benefit from their horsepower and obtain a decent beautiful game for a decade to live with.

Again, it's not about photorealism, please, get that out of the discussion. It's about doing something correctly. KSP2 is not photorealistic, by far, and it's not its objective, it's fine. But the direction chosen is just plain weird with a lot of laziness, and no, it's not ALL because of its EA state. I asked you if you thought it would actually improve enough, considering the dynamic of the team, of the updates, of the actual performances and so on : I personally don't think that the game would have been more than 30-40% more beautiful with 4-5 years of added dev. Except for mods of course, but, hell... We won't ever know.

We don't care about KSP2, it's dead. I'm speaking about a new KSP like game able to live for a decade just like its predecessor, which was quite bad when it comes to technical aspects and global aesthetic. Just dated, that's it, and I would not like a new KSP game being out in 2025+ to look like a 2017-18 game at most, just because... KSP would benefit A LOT from good sceneries for plenty reasons that I won't repeat here, and I would not tolerate any kind of "laziness" about it just because "It's a KSP game and its community is totally fine with bad graphics. Objective bad graphics, not artistic choices.