Source code and development process

[Yoha]

Hi. I am genuinely curious to know if the developers of KSP intend to release the source code or part of it under any license (be it FLOSS or not). If it is envisioned, do they have some kind of condition like having sold that much licenses, or being famous enough (like, not to be threatened by plagiarism like Candy Swipe)? I remember that Notched said that the code of Minecraft was to be released at some point in the future but nothing happened eventually. All I could find on the subject is this not very informative thread.

As it is quite probable that the game will remain fully closed-source, I would like to know more on the development process: language, libraries, do the developers prefer to code under Windows or Linux, which VCS, IDE/editor, etc? From what I have read here and there, I would guess that the code was written in C#, so probably on Windows using VS. I also understand that it makes some use of Unity. Is it right?

[sal_vager]

There are no plans for this, sorry, KSP is built in Unity which is proprietary software, it uses C# a lot because that is what Unity uses for cross platform compatibility via Mono.

The Squad code is itself also proprietary unfortunately, but Squad have deliberately tried to make KSP as accessible to modders as they could.

[Yoha]

Thanks for the info. I think that quite a lot of the compatibility issues come from the use of Unity through Mono, which is has some trouble imitating .Net . However, I also understand that switching to another language/library would take far more time =/ .

If there are some coders around there. What language would you use for coding KSP? Which libraries? Personally, I like to reinvent the wheel so I would go for C99 and base libraries (GL,GLU,glut/glew,etc), but I would not make it past the KSC interface in a reasonable amount of time.

[Aghanim]

If I'm a coder (and I'm not, at least yet) I will use massive amount of OpenCL and Bullet physics library. With OpenCL, you could say good bye to 300 part lag by CPU multithreading, you could go >1000 parts by using GPU acceleration

[r4pt0r]

If I'm a coder (and I'm not, at least yet) I will use massive amount of OpenCL and Bullet physics library. With OpenCL, you could say good bye to 300 part lag by CPU multithreading, you could go >1000 parts by using GPU acceleration

i think the devs would have tried that m8. i belive that multithreading is something unity just cant do.

[Javster]

Mono? And Squad's logo is a monkey?

[sal_vager]

Unity does multithread, but the physics can't be split amongst the cores and as the physics are 90% of KSP this becomes a performance bottleneck.

Bullet and OpenCL don't integrate well with Unity currently, but this is slowly changing.

And yes, the Squad logo is a chimpanzee head