Will we see performance improvements now that Unity 4.3 is out?

[jotapeh]

Apologies if this is the wrong forum, or if there is a dev blog somewhere that already mentions this. I'm having some trouble finding relevant information.

Unity 4.3 was released recently, and it states that there have been huge performance improvements in particular to Graphics (culling, lighting, etc..)

I was just wondering if Squad had converted KSP to the newest version of Unity3D yet - and if so, can we expect a little performance boost in the next update? I am tired of flying from the maps screen in order to keep my craft responsive!

[Jim DiGriz]

Yes, but speaking as a software developer, since 4.3 only came out a week ago, I'd be a bit surprised to see this in the next release of KSP. They might have been anticipating the release and already working on prereleases of 4.3, but generally you don't slot things like this into a release cycle that is already underway.

[numerobis]

Out of principle and long experience, I'd wait at least two weeks for the early adopters to find any huge problems, and probably I'd wait until 4.3.1 -- there's not usually enough benefit compared to the risk. In fact, I made that very call this morning on my own project.

The performance bits of Unity 4.3 appear to mostly be about baking the scene, unless I read the release notes wrong. I'm not sure how much can be baked in the KSP setting; your spacecraft is moving all over the place, and that's the most complicated part. Maybe we'll get higher frame rate at launch?

[jotapeh]

I guess the main reason I asked is that I'm a Unity developer myself, and converting my projects this week has been as simple as opening them in the newest version of Unity. Generally I've seen some small improvements and encountered no conversion issues (yet.)

KSP is obviously a fair bit more complex than my projects, but I wondered if there was some talk of them already experimenting with 4.3 on a git branch and if it had rendered any interesting results.

Ever the optimist, I guess..

[Supernovy]

As far as I know, they're working towards Unity 4.2 for the next update.

[Jim DiGriz]

Generally as a dev you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you don't ship the bleeding edge Right Nowz then you get beat up by people wondering why it takes you so long, while if you skip your Q/A and acceptance cycle and ship something early then you wind up breaking in edge conditions you skipped testing and users come at you with pitchforks because you busted all the things. Revving our internal Q/A to be as complicated as what some of our customers are doing with our product is a constant challenge. Not surprised they're just working on getting 4.2 out the door as 4.3 is getting released, that's actually really not too bad...

[SilverWarior]

The main reason why developers usually aren't using freshly released game engines is becouse those werent tested enough and can contain critical bugs which could make your game completly unplayable. So it is sometimes better to stick with previous version as you know which nugs to expect. And this is especially usefull as you can quickly see wheter a bug that has been reported by your comunits is game engine related or related to your game implementation. If it is rellated to game engine there is usually nothing you can do except avoid it (not always posible) but if it is related to your game implementation you can actually fix it.

As for original question wheter using latest Unity would improve game performance:

Upgrading to newer version of unity will probably improve game performance a bit especially in the area of graphics. But the problem with KSP is that most pepole are expiriencing performance isues due to physics part of Unity game engine which hasn't been updated in a while. So don't expect any major performance improments at this point yet.