How long before a performance increase?

[protoz]

build me a car in Minecraft

and oh, BF3 although is massively more parallel than KSP, is not a good comparison because it doesn't have as much rigid body physics.

By upgrading to an I5 you'll get a massive improvement because of the much improved single core performance when compared to the Core 2 architecture.

You should consider context of words within sentence and or paragraph. For one i was not comparing BF3 to KSP i was comparing that my hardware upgrade will give me a boost to 99% of software, excluding KSP, this is context which you failed to recognize.

Build me a circuit board in KSP oh wait... I'm good at this too!!! I would stick to these kind of arguments if i was 10 years old.

[Sir Nahme]

are you kidding? There are a VERY large number of design limits to minecraft

the least of which being java's horrible optomisation itself

[protoz]

are you kidding? There are a VERY large number of design limits to minecraft

the least of which being java's horrible optomisation itself

What are they? Because if there are limits in MineCraft i've yet to reach them or hear about them for 4 years of playing the game.

Which brings me to my original point. KSP limits are reached when part counter starts hitting 200 or more parts. While Minecraft limits exist, but are unknown, at least to me, they are probably in the 200,000 give or take part count equivalent of KSP limits.

So maybe KSP should expand its limits when PC hardware is improved, because its current limits are outdated and hard locked to the year 2000 PC hardware.

Edited June 22, 2013 by protoz

[SuperWeegee4000]

I haven't really gotten any big projects together yet (third day of owning KSP as of writing), but I doubt I'll experience any game-crippling lag effects for a while yet. Because frankly, my computer is what little computers want to grow up to be.

[Sir Nahme]

What are they? Because if there are limits in MineCraft i've yet to reach them or hear about them for 4 years of playing the game.

Which brings me to my original point. KSP limits are reached when part counter starts hitting 200 or more parts. While Minecraft limits exist, but are unknown, at least to me, they are probably in the 200,000 give or take part count equivalent of KSP limits.

So maybe KSP should expand its limits when PC hardware is improved, because its current limits are outdated and hard locked to the year 2000 PC hardware.

Anything round for starters? memory limitations are the same (or worse, if you don't use your own batch file, which isn't STOCK) than unity, you are severely limited in moving parts, you have a bare >1< part size regardless of mods. Vertical limitations on both how far down or up you can build. These are just the most obvious and bare bones issues that show up in 5 minutes of play. If you truly believe you are unfettered in minecraft there is clearly not going to be any way you could possibly understand that KSP is not just a game focused on design it is also a simulator and that there are already INTENDED design limits in place such as TWR and Dv, that the ones provided by machine and code drawbacks (that they have been continually working to reduce) are one small fraction of an exceedingly complicated issue.

[DisarmingBaton5]

Oh Unity...

[protoz]

Anything round for starters? memory limitations are the same (or worse, if you don't use your own batch file, which isn't STOCK) than unity, you are severely limited in moving parts, you have a bare >1< part size regardless of mods. Vertical limitations on both how far down or up you can build. These are just the most obvious and bare bones issues that show up in 5 minutes of play. If you truly believe you are unfettered in minecraft there is clearly not going to be any way you could possibly understand that KSP is not just a game focused on design it is also a simulator and that there are already INTENDED design limits in place such as TWR and Dv, that the ones provided by machine and code drawbacks (that they have been continually working to reduce) are one small fraction of an exceedingly complicated issue.

Where do i begin? i guess with the basics again.

We're talking about design limits due to performance aka make anything more then 200 parts in KSP, your gonna have a bad time. But your bringing up the fact that you can't build vertical after a certain point or the game doesn't have round blocks... thats facepalm/cringeworthy response you made there, PS. there are mods that increase vertical height to infinity. I can build anything and everything in MC and not have my game come to a halt.

You know you can't dig in KSP or go underground? thats the kind of points your bringing up and they have nothing to do w. design limits due to performance.

Edited June 22, 2013 by protoz

[korda]

They won't change engine anyway, too much work. It would be like writing the game all over again (really). Choosing Unity may be considered as some kind of error even by Squad themselves now, since it puts some limits on them. On the other hand without ready engine they wouldn't be able to make that game anyway.

[Sir Nahme]

Where do i begin? i guess with the basics again.

We're talking about design limits due to performance aka make anything more then 200 parts in KSP, your gonna have a bad time. But your bringing up the fact that you can't build vertical after a certain point or the game doesn't have round blocks... thats facepalm/cringeworthy response you made there, PS. there are mods that increase vertical height to infinity. I can build anything and everything in MC and not have my game come to a halt.

You know you can't dig in KSP or go underground? thats the kind of points your bringing up and they have nothing to do w. design limits due to performance.

Nice of you to change the definition of "design limits" to suite your strawman and ad hom dismissal. Nice of you to ignore the memory issues that minecraft is plagued with.

You've pretty much confirmed my summation that this is a pointless discussion with someone who doesn't care to understand the reality of the situation.

[protoz]

Nice of you to change the definition of "design limits" to suite your strawman and ad hom dismissal. Nice of you to ignore the memory issues that minecraft is plagued with.

You've pretty much confirmed my summation that this is a pointless discussion with someone who doesn't care to understand the reality of the situation.

When you quoted me on on:

find me something WITHOUT design limits and you might have a point

Maybe you should of read the context of what i was referring to because i didn't change anything, you just failed to understand what the discussion was about.

And the term "design limits" was something i quoted from jwenting, not my choice of words but his context refers to design limits due to performance.

This goes deep, might have to read the quote of a quoter of a quoter, but you know you might have to do that to understand the reality of the situation.

Edited June 22, 2013 by protoz

[Sir Nahme]

Maybe you should of read the context of what i was referring to because i didn't change anything, you just failed to understand what the discussion was about.

Argumentum ad hominem; An argument made personally against an opponent instead of against their argument: Check

Ignoring the points made against that the minecraft engine arguments to pursue this course: Strawman check

[Clamps]

It's silly to perform floating point physics calculations on a CPU when GPUs were designed to do them 1000x faster and more efficiently. Switch to a modern 64 bit game engine please, before it really comes back to bite you.

[protoz]

Argumentum ad hominem; An argument made personally against an opponent instead of against their argument: Check

Ignoring the points made against that the minecraft engine arguments to pursue this course: Strawman check

Your delusional... You don't understand the context of what you quote & assume what the discussion is about using your imagination. Then you can't comprehend how KSP caps your design with performance halt while MineCraft doesn't. Which wasn't even my main point as i was referring to KSP not utilizing 2013 PC hardware.

[Ted]

This discussion has become rather heated and on a tangent, suddenly. I think what is best is if we all take a step back from it, take a breath or two and resume discussion of the original topic.

[Clamps]

This discussion has become rather heated and on a tangent, suddenly. I think what is best is if we all take a step back from it, take a breath or two and resume discussion of the original topic.

Heh, I was wondering when you were going to post. There's not much left to discuss. The poor performance is caused by Unity not supporting current technologies, and was overall a poor engine choice for ksp. Hopefully the Unity devs step up their game.

[Ted]

Unity does cause some pretty bad performance in places, but is pretty useful in others. Engine choice is a pretty difficult area, you can rarely get a flexible engine, especially for the type of game KSP is, as well as excellent performance and not at extortionate prices.

[Clamps]

That's why a custom homebrew engine would have been the way to go. Only issue with that is time and budget. Here we are, not even at release, and we are heavily limited performance wise with no fix in sight. That doesn't make me very optimistic for release.

I suppose we do have a long way to go, and I hope to be surprised. I just wish the game would use my video cards!

[Ted]

Yeah, I know how you feel, all that GPU power left untapped. However, I don't doubt that the Dev Team have some optimisation tricks still up their sleeves, so we could still see some performance improvements overall.

[boxman]

What are they? Because if there are limits in MineCraft i've yet to reach them or hear about them for 4 years of playing the game.

Which brings me to my original point. KSP limits are reached when part counter starts hitting 200 or more parts. While Minecraft limits exist, but are unknown, at least to me, they are probably in the 200,000 give or take part count equivalent of KSP limits.

So maybe KSP should expand its limits when PC hardware is improved, because its current limits are outdated and hard locked to the year 2000 PC hardware.

How can you even compare those two games? The physics they use are entirely different. The way KSP does physics due to it being a space simulator requires FAR more from your cpu. No amount of optimization is going to change that without sacrificing realism.

[asmi]

While Unity is good engine, it simply isn't designed for physics-heavy games like KSP. That's why every single simulation game out there uses custom engine specifically designed for it. But I seriously doubt Squad have enough resources and expertise to build cross-platform engine by themselves. And if they opt for Win-only engine (which is waaay easier and might very well be within their abilities), a lot of Mac/Linux players won't like it...

[jfx]

That's why a custom homebrew engine would have been the way to go. Only issue with that is time and budget. Here we are, not even at release, and we are heavily limited performance wise with no fix in sight. That doesn't make me very optimistic for release.

I suppose we do have a long way to go, and I hope to be surprised. I just wish the game would use my video cards!

There are zero people at squad with the capability to develop a custom game engine which would be suitable for KSPs needs.

Take a look at some siggraph papers from crytek, epic or some of the others to realize how far off limits a project like that would be for squad. Cryengine or UE nad their respective toolkits were created with hundreds of thousands man hours.

Also: They spent two years on a game alpha when starting with a finished engine. With a custom engine KSP would make Duke Nukem Forever seem like a speedy development.

I'm rather pleased with the performance of KSP, especially considering all the calculations that your CPU has to do. Think about how many physics calculations that the engine has to crunch every second for a 700 part craft. KSP is simulating physics on every single one of those 700 parts. Have you ever seen a persistence file? That's a lot of data that's being modified dozens of times per second.

Any capable physics solver eats the physx implementation which unity uses for breakfast. (CPU and GPU based)

Edited June 22, 2013 by jfx

[ASnogarD]

Well , while I dont expect Squad to try the home brew engine route, its not out of range and scope of a small indie team ... just highly unlikely.

Unknown Worlds use a homemade engine for their indie title Natural Selection 2, and it has been praised for good visuals and effects and is reasonably good in performance and COULD be a lot better but the devs opted for massive mod support so hinged a lot of the engine on LUA scripts to allow easier modifications.

Took them about 4 years but the main engine programmer had started on the engine before they dumped Source for Spark, so give or take 5 years to code that engine.

Possible, but highly unlikely.

Oh yeah, now that game in development took ages before the game was in a playable state...even after launch there was a lot of work to optimise it and most of the optimisation came about 2 - 3 builds prior to release.

Alpha version was so slow it ran about 5 FPS at lowest settings on the top end machines, build 156 got it so more machines could run it at about 30 FPS, but it was near release that the game hit 60+ FPS.

Point is that optimisation is a late comer to the development stages, as developers are still fiddling with the insides of the code spending time to optimise it is really a waste as often parts are simply ripped out and replaced or discarded.

UE and / or Cryengine is a commercial product and is designed for multi platforms and much more variation for usage than say a home made engine for a single game, so it takes longer to make a master of all trades than a master of one trade.

[Clamps]

You say they have nobody with the skills or enough people.

That's why "hiring" is a thing. Maybe you've heard of it?

[jfx]

What a nice attitude you have, charming indeed.

People with the necessary skills (designing and writing highly optimized code) are expensive - very expensive. (I know some people working at crytek and phenomic). I doubt SQUAD can afford to lock some of them away in a basement somewhere until they eventually get a return a couple years later. Writing an engine from scratch for a single game is like reinventing the combustion engine to build a car.

And the "new engine" pont is moot anyway It's not going to happen. Especially since the problem is not unity itself but its Physics module.

[Fel]

And what do you think will happen with every performance increase? People will just build bigger and bigger and always reach that limit where performance goes down. If they make 1500 part ships run smoothly then people like me and most likely you will just start building 3000 part ships.

THIS!

Whatever they do, people are going to take it over the design limits and then complain.

Seen it time and time again with other games and simulators that allow modding or building your own stuff. It's the one constant between them.

And then there's the fps addicts who complain that they can't get more than X fps, will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get 0.1 fps more than they used to.

Personally, I consider any argument of the form "KSP Should Ditch X Support" (which even has comeup with ATI for nVidia PhysX) to be a variation of "I spent $3,000 on my computer... I deserve the ability to run at max FPS with AA on 16, VSYNC on, graphics / physics maxed, and still have a 3000 part ship."

If I can run KSP on my WAY subpar system and be happy with the performance at "Good / Beautiful" settings... so I STILL can go lower if I wanted, and have other ways to get more FPS... I don't see how people can justify their complaint about KSP's performance.

The only unjustified crashing I experienced was with ISA MapSat (I'm fairly certain it has to do with the repeated PNG Caching [perhaps including a PNG_Writer so he only has to do bitwise changes would greatly reduce the amount of memory the thing pulls]... but it is a DEV build anyways.) Everything else was just me repeatedly swapping back and forth between the game and Windows... and I don't have to limit myself just because of FPS, and have launched a few ships around 700 or more parts.

My current "Mun Base" project is actually several buildings which are built on "looks" rather than function, so more part count there as well