KSP For the Playstation 3

[Majorjim!]

Note to OP*

Work harder.

Save up.

Buy PC.

Become part of the master race.

MJ

[briansun1]

I'd have to argue against that, I reckon a PS3/360 could run KSP just as well as a PC you could build today for £500, and Xbox One and PS4 would have no problem, just saying.

That said, I'd rather see it stay on console. Console ports of PC games are never as good, take Minecraft as an example.

no the new consoles would struggle to run it due to the weak CPU. And you can build a PC for the same amount of money that the ps4/xbox costs and have it perform better or cheaper and still be on par.

[briansun1]

PlayStation 3 uses the Cell microprocessor, designed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM, as its CPU, which is made up of one 3.2 GHz PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs).[81] The eighth SPE is disabled to improve chip yields.[82][83] Only six of the seven SPEs are accessible to developers as the seventh SPE is reserved by the console's operating system.[83] Graphics processing is handled by the NVIDIA RSX 'Reality Synthesizer', which can produce resolutions from 480i/576i SD up to 1080p HD.[75] PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of XDR DRAM main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory for the RSX.

Could someone explain to me how a 3.2 ghz processor and an 256 MB NVIDIA graphics processor are not capable of running a game that bottlenecks at the CPU? As for controls, is there some kind of unwritten rule that says "me must not plug in keyboard and mouse to console".

because CPU speed and GPU memory do not dictate how well something will run.

[LostElement]

KSP is very CPU demanding. The Ps3, Ps4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One, do not have very powerful CPU's. There are also way too many controls to fit into one controller. I think the most you can get into KSP, if say it was fit into a controller, is 100 parts maybe 130. Even then that's taxing.

[Red Iron Crown]

<Insert obligatory Suggestions & Development thread post about suggestion being on the What Not To Suggest list>

I think the in-flight controls could be done on a console controller, the analog sticks would be better in some respects than the on/off response of keyboard keys. Lots of people are using 360 controllers for KSP, though I'm don't think anyone has mapped every control to it.

The VAB is a different story though. Either the options for assembly would have to be greatly reduced or the construction process would be much more painful than keyboard and mouse.

As for processing power, consoles are at a disadvantage compared to PCs, because of their focus on GPU over CPU. "Look at these beautiful graphics" sells more consoles than "look at the number of objects having physics accurately simulated" does.

[LordOfTheOrbits]

Yeah the consoles are more focused on the GPU than on the CPU, but if another engine that supports GPU-acceralation for physics was used it could be done. The only problem would be that you would have to completely rewrite the whole game for another engine.

[Lundmunchkins]

Actually this is a good idea. ONLY IF you did it before multiplayer comes out, because we all know what bloodthirsty PS3 players would do with this game

[Nemrav]

anybody looked at all the licensing stuff that is in the way....

not to mention they are indie, therefore they aren't on the list of "trusted devs" in the microsoft/sony departement...

it would take a lot of time away from real development

the cost of KSP would rise significantly..

no mods

CONSOLE IS NOT DESIGNED FOR EARLY ACCESS GAMES !

all of the performance issues people are forking out

unity doesn't yet do builds for the newest consoles....

all the control issues...

people who don't know how stuff works, dont try to learn will complain and complain and give ksp a bad reputation (those people hang out on consoles typically..)

well now maybe you get the point...

[coolitic]

Because very large craft would have 5 fps. Also the devs don't have that many resources (i assume).

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

-snip-

http://compass.xboxlive.com/assets/69/e3/69e37cdc-000f-460d-b478-2398c03c872e.jpg

What I can see are:

Four (?) 4-directional sticks and two buttons.

What is needed (bare minimum) to play KSP?

Mouse for looking around - right stick

WASDQE - left stick

HNIJKL - left stick with d-pad up to toggle

throttle control - L and R triggers

SAS on/off + RCS on/off - Dpad left right

Staging - A

Escape to get menu - start button

camera changes - select

external/IVA view switch - select

time warp up/down - bumpers L and R

ship switch forward/back - B and X

action keys 1~0 - Tragic

Display changes F1~F4 - Click In Left Stick

Key to switch between normal/docking/map - Dpad Toggle

Key to switch between celestial bodies - In map: Select, again

separate rover controls - not part of standard configuration in KSP, but extremely useful - Again, Dpad L and R

Map - Y

-snip-

There, I fixed all the buttons so it CAN work on a controller

Edited February 27, 2014 by TheCanadianVendingMachine

[Guest]

Ok, I think what I'm hearing is a 3.2ghz cpu from a console runs slower than a 3.2 ghz cpu from a pc. I'm having a hard time digesting that. I could see where the chips from different manufactures may have slightly different performance because of the quality of materials and the ability to shed off excess heat and such, but I wouldn't think it would be a huge difference, not so much so that it would mean the difference between playable and unplayable.

I agree that it's counter-intuitive to plug a mouse and keyboard into a console, but it can be done.

I thought Unity already had the ability to port or compile for a console? I think it would be a great idea to publish KSP for consoles. Even if it meant dumbing down the game somewhat or trimming back the parts list to conserve memory. It would tap into a VERY large market, and make squad money that could be used for more pc content development. Everyone wins. That's a good thing, ain't it?

edit : I just read the post from Nemrav, and he's got a good point about the licensing issues. That is a major sticking point.

Edited February 27, 2014 by Otis

[Shna_na]

Read OP, too many replies to fish through in too little time.

Long story short, none of the consoles (excluding next-gen, but even they'd struggle) have the power to run KSP, plain and simple. Not only that, but the controls would be difficult to map logically onto a controller. It would also drastically slow down updates and keep the dev team far busier than they need to be - they're already overworked by how much they do to push out the updates. Not only that, but bugs may also vary from console to PC. Also, as far as I know, consoles don't run Unity. Without Unity, I'm pretty sure the game doesn't run (though I may be wrong, my programming knowledge consists of nil).

TL;DR: It can't happen. Go read it, it's not that long.

[briansun1]

Ok, I think what I'm hearing is a 3.2ghz cpu from a console runs slower than a 3.2 ghz cpu from a pc. I'm having a hard time digesting that. I could see where the chips from different manufactures may have slightly different performance because of the quality of materials and the ability to shed off excess heat and such, but I wouldn't think it would be a huge difference, not so much so that it would mean the difference between playable and unplayable.

I agree that it's counter-intuitive to plug a mouse and keyboard into a console, but it can be done.

I thought Unity already had the ability to port or compile for a console? I think it would be a great idea to publish KSP for consoles. Even if it meant dumbing down the game somewhat or trimming back the parts list to conserve memory. It would tap into a VERY large market, and make squad money that could be used for more pc content development. Everyone wins. That's a good thing, ain't it?

edit : I just read the post from Nemrav, and he's got a good point about the licensing issues. That is a major sticking point.

take a i5 3.5ghz CPU from 6 years ago and compare it to a i5 3.5 ghz CPU from last year I will bet that the one last year will out preform the on 6 years ago

[Nemrav]

Unity does do builds for consoles (ps3/xbox360 im pretty sure), but those as people have already pointed out won't run ksp at all,

but not for the ps4/xbox one which could possibly handle ksp...

as with multi-threading this is out of the control of devs, so as much as you like, up to unity....

don't complain about how other engines run, they are simply older and therefore have had more time to implement the updates...

btw : what about the matter of putting it on a dvd, and simply running it from there, since consoles don't install things.... ever thought of that...

yes, that means no mods, thats one of the biggest disadvantages of consoles...

and I know about cloud, but what happens when you don't have internet connection ?

[technicalfool]

btw : what about the matter of putting it on a dvd, and simply running it from there, since consoles don't install things.... ever thought of that...

Yes, yes they do. That's what that hard disk drive is there for. That's why so many games now will say something like "needs 4GB HDD space" on the back of the box. It's also how game downloads work. And patches.

And, presumably, mods. There is no technical reason that a console version of KSP could not support mods. The only difficulties you would get would be the same as making mods that use their own binaries and work between Windows, OS X and Linux. Consoles have used more and more standard means of development ever since the Xbox 360 and PS3. This isn't like the 16 bit era or the PS1 and PS2, with exotic weirdness and needing to persuade a bunch of different subsystems to talk with assembly language and timing issues.

And I'm still launching multi-hundred part rockets just fine on my crusty old AMD X4 640.

[technicalfool]

not to mention they are indie, therefore they aren't on the list of "trusted devs" in the microsoft/sony departement...

It's true that you need to sign an NDA to use the PS3 development tools. You certainly did when I was in the final year of my computer games technology course. It's one reason I chose computer vision and AI as opposed to console programming as my major (that and computer vision and AI was just so much more interesting).

Probably not true that Sony would not be quite happy for Squad to release KSP for the Playstation. In fact I think Sony would probably be falling over themselves to sign them up for an exclusive that would keep it off the Xbox for a number of months. Maybe not right now while it's still being developed, but certainly once the game is feature-complete and most of the bugs have been hammered out.

I think people are underestimating just how much oomph the CPUs inside PS3s and Xbox 360s have. I would be most surprised if KSP could not run sufficiently well. That and, by the time we reach 1.0, it's more likely that the Xbox One and PS4 will be the consoles to develop for.

[Jouni]

Ok, I think what I'm hearing is a 3.2ghz cpu from a console runs slower than a 3.2 ghz cpu from a pc. I'm having a hard time digesting that. I could see where the chips from different manufactures may have slightly different performance because of the quality of materials and the ability to shed off excess heat and such, but I wouldn't think it would be a huge difference, not so much so that it would mean the difference between playable and unplayable.

First, a 3.2 GHz CPU from 2013 is much faster than a 3.2 GHz CPU from 2006. Intel and AMD spend billions for R&D every year, and it shows.

Second, a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 from around 2005-2006 is faster in single-threaded tasks than the 3.2 GHz PPE in PS3. Multi-threaded is programming is often hard, and many tasks don't really parallelize that well. Because of that, Intel has spent vast amounts of money over the last couple of decades to improve the single-threaded performance of its processors. IBM took another route with the Xenon processor (used in Xbox 360) and the Cell processor (used in PS3, developed with Sony and Toshiba), spending a similar number of transistors for a larger number of slower CPU cores. As a result, Cell and Xenon are much faster than an Intel CPU from the same era, if the task parallelizes well, and somewhat slower than the Intel CPU for serial tasks. Because the computationally intensive tasks in games often parallelize well, PS3 and Xbox 360 still remain useful, even though their hardware has been obsolete for many years.

For similar reasons, GPUs are much faster than the CPUs you would get for the same price.

[Nuke]

my core 2 quad can still run the game quite well. so im pretty sure this generation of consoles can run ksp just fine. its all x86 after all.

issues of controls could be handled with on screen menus. the dualshock 4 has that touchpad for the ingame cursor, ship controls would be through the sticks. i would use the dpad to navigate on screen menus. the rest of the buttons would be context sensitive to handle all modes of play. the gyro could control the view angle. it would be tricky but it could be done. if you wanted to do an xbone port, i think the controllers are less sophisticated, but you do have kinect for motion control. its too bad the wii-u is way underpowered, since its touchscreen controller would just rock the game. steam boxen would do quite well, since its really just a pc, just jack in a keyboard and mouse.

the other side of it is console peasants dont like games that are actually a challenge. they like aimbots and simple controls. im not sure ksp would fly well in those circles. their brain would melt at the notion of having to do some math to win.

[Sirrobert]

It could be done and controlled reasonably well ... with some compromises. I think the camera control would be a the hardest part. However, I don't really mess with the camera position that often once I get it where I like it.

WASDQE = Left stick + L1, R1

throttle control = L2, R2

SAS+ RCS = X,B

Staging = A

menu = Start button

Camera = Right Stick (Zooming might be an issue)

external/IVA = Depress Right Stick

time warp = D-Pad left/right

action keys = Selection wheel on D-Pad down.

HNIJKL = Use Y or menu to toggle translation control. Then left stick + R1, R2

normal/docking/map = D-Pad Up

switch between celestial bodies/vessels = menu or alter keys when in map view(x,y bodies &a,b vessels)

Forgot about the manouver nodes did you?

Have fun fine tuning those while manipulating the map while manipulating your ship

[technicalfool]

Forgot about the manouver nodes did you?

Have fun fine tuning those while manipulating the map while manipulating your ship

How many times do you manipulate manoeuvre nodes while manipulating the map view, while manipulating your ship?

How could this not be solved by turning the right thumbstick into a mouse controller?

[Dunbaratu]

This has been suggested lots of times. KSP has too complex controls for a controller. I don't see whats wrong with KSP on the computer.

The controls aren't the problem.

A PS3 has 512 MB of ram. THAT's the problem.

[Red Iron Crown]

The RAM is definitely an issue.

I'm not so sure about CPU power being an issue, I play KSP on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo and it's playable, though only barely for multi-hundred part launches.

[Jouni]

I'm not so sure about CPU power being an issue, I play KSP on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo and it's playable, though only barely for multi-hundred part launches.

The Intel Core microarchitecture was a significant improvement in single-threaded performance compared to the Pentium 4 era, and the last Pentium 4 processors were already clearly faster single-threaded than what was included in PS3 and Xbox 360.

[Dodgey]

Ok, have any of you tried to play an rts with a console controller? Not fun.

[Capt Snuggler]

Ok, have any of you tried to play an rts with a console controller? Not fun.

I tried mapping KSP to two N64 controllers. I had an idea about modding my own Soyuz style RCS controls by Hacking up N64 contollers. it worked ok, but I still needed to use Keyboard for action groups and stageing etc. still docking was great fun. felt like a simulator.