KSP on Unreal 3 engine

[Kerbonautical]

No offense but this thread is useless.

Why are u even discussing??? I do not think that this subject is a matter do the players it is solely something the developers should think off.

Nothing said here will change anything about wich engine the game is using/will use in the future.

So a mod please lock this thread down.

I don't get why you feel you get to tell the mods what they should or shouldn't lock, that's their call to make as it always has and always will be, but more importantly why it bothers you what people wish to discuss related to KSP on the forums. If it bothers you then don't post rather than shouting about why people shouldn't discuss it or wait until the mods either lock it, or it dies out.

You say no offense but then come in basically telling us what to discuss or not to discuss, which is pretty offensive.

[Kerbart]

If we're off to lala-land, why settle for the Unreal engine? I propose the Super Practical Analytical Computational Engine (S.P.A.C.E.) which:

• Renders Ray-Trace graphics at 50fps, requiring only a single core 1.2GHz processor and 512 MB of memory
  
• Offers n-body physics for a 2000 lightyear universe on a 0.1mm resolution
  
• Has no problem with 5000-part ships
  
• Has built-in multiplayer support
  
• Comes with a special LEGACY module that makes porting over games that run on the Unity engine a trivial task
  

I know this is all BS, but so is Squad switching over to the Unreal engine, so why stop there?

[rtxoff]

Thread title:

[h=2]KSP on Unreal 3 engine[/h]sorry but in my eyes this is already offensive enough deserving to be locked down.

KSP would never had been that what it is now with the Unreal engine.

The devs had a reason why they have chosen the tool of their choise. Most probably at that time it was their prefered tool to get the job done.

Discussing now about an other engine is like discussing which hammer you should use after you already built the house.

But no, i am not telling anyone what to discuss or not, just continue. If u feel the urge for it just go on.

BTW it is free for everyone to programm his own KSP like game on the Unreal Engine, you will see how far you will get with that.

*laugh*

[djnattyd]

Isn't PhysX bound to NVIDIA cards? If so, then those of us using ATI/AMD hardware would see absolutely no improvement regardless of whether KSP stayed on Unity or went to Unreal.

[Kerbonautical]

Thread title:

[h=2]KSP on Unreal 3 engine[/h]sorry but in my eyes this is already offensive enough deserving to be locked down.

KSP would never had been that what it is now with the Unreal engine.

The devs had a reason why they have chosen the tool of their choise. Most probably at that time it was their prefered tool to get the job done.

Discussing now about an other engine is like discussing which hammer you should use after you already built the house.

But no, i am not telling anyone what to discuss or not, just continue. If u feel the urge for it just go on.

BTW it is free for everyone to programm his own KSP like game on the Unreal Engine, you will see how far you will get with that.

*laugh*

I don't get your attitude problem. I never said anything about building my own KSP or changing the game as it is. Nor do I see why it would be offensive to think about what may have been different.

I regularly think about small things that could completely change the way many games work but by your logic it's slander to the devs. The discussion we're having now is a lot more useless, hence I won't be continuing it.

My post was related more heavily to the future of Unity anyway and the features of the next version. If anyone happens to know if GPU offloading is in I would love to know

[Thiel]

Personally I would be more interested in how well it would work with the Real Virtuality engine, I mean it already has proved itself good at handling large enviroments with a lot of complexity happening at once, and also seen that it can be applied reasonably well to a space game in Take on Mars (even if it and KSP are worlds apart) But I'd like to think that with a hit to the graphics it would also be a fairly capable engine for such things.

Of course in reality I have no actual understanding of these engines at a developer level so can only guess from an end user point of view. However I'm fairly certain that Unity will be perfectly suited by the time of KSP's official release. We know now that multi-threading support is on the way (which really should have been fixed a long long time ago) and I don't know about GPU offloading but I'd imagine that is likely also in the works.

At a business level though all of the engines are going to be in extremely tight competition this year as the devs start to shift over to the new generation of consoles and there's a good chance that one could take a large lead over the others early on and hold that lead throughout such as the Unreal Engine 3 did. I'd hazard a guess that Unity will need to at the least offer Multi-Threading and GPU offloading considering other engines will be including some extremely advanced physics solutions down the line such as the soft body physics in the ongoing works for CryEngine 3. This really is the year for everyone to prove how versatile their engines are.

As I understand it, the guys who did much of the soft body physics work have moved their work to the Torque3D engine because CryEngine was too expensive to use.

[Kerbonautical]

As I understand it, the guys who did much of the soft body physics work have moved their work to the Torque3D engine because CryEngine was too expensive to use.

Interesting, I had no idea they had transferred to another engine, also one I've never actually encountered yet that I know of. I like the idea though that they're carrying over their soft body physics work to an engine that's open source but also cheaper. Hopefully down the line then we should see those soft body physics made available to a larger range of developers from different runs of the ladder, rather than being confined to mostly high budget devs. To be honest though I'm not surprised to see them break away from CE3, it seem's to have really fallen short of it's expected adoption rates and it looks like UE4 may also be looking at a similar situation, to hazard a guess of course. The previously lesser known engines seem to be getting a lot of the praise as of late instead.

i know the the following is unlikely to happen, but the idea of KSP with soft body physics makes me drool thinking of all those crashes! it's certainly one of the more interesting technologies to me personally. Maybe one day in the far far future if we ever get a KSP sequel

Another engine just popped to mind though. Unlimited Detail would really have made a perfect candidate if it can actually live up to it's touted achievements and is ever actually released, though personally I'm sceptic of the existence of the engine at all considering the radio silence that ensued after the announcement a good year or two ago now.

[Pecan]

[@ OP: Don't make me revive my 'what if KSP ran in EGA' thread ^^]

[Caelib]

Aside from the planet textures from orbit and a lack of stock weather/clouds, I think KSP looks pretty good for the size of the environments. Unreal would look good, but you'd have a game about 1/100000000000000 of the size.

[rkman]

Again, I opted for Unreal because of performance, not graphical.

How well does Unreal perform when it runs a map that measures several billion meters in diameter?

I'd guess nobody knows.

[Thiel]

Interesting, I had no idea they had transferred to another engine, also one I've never actually encountered yet that I know of. I like the idea though that they're carrying over their soft body physics work to an engine that's open source but also cheaper. Hopefully down the line then we should see those soft body physics made available to a larger range of developers from different runs of the ladder, rather than being confined to mostly high budget devs. To be honest though I'm not surprised to see them break away from CE3, it seem's to have really fallen short of it's expected adoption rates and it looks like UE4 may also be looking at a similar situation, to hazard a guess of course. The previously lesser known engines seem to be getting a lot of the praise as of late instead.

i know the the following is unlikely to happen, but the idea of KSP with soft body physics makes me drool thinking of all those crashes! it's certainly one of the more interesting technologies to me personally. Maybe one day in the far far future if we ever get a KSP sequel

Another engine just popped to mind though. Unlimited Detail would really have made a perfect candidate if it can actually live up to it's touted achievements and is ever actually released, though personally I'm sceptic of the existence of the engine at all considering the radio silence that ensued after the announcement a good year or two ago now.

I don't know why they chose the Torque3D engine, but as I understand it the physics they're using are completely custom made.

[Xaiier]

If we're off to lala-land, why settle for the Unreal engine? I propose the Super Practical Analytical Computational Engine (S.P.A.C.E.) which:

• Renders Ray-Trace graphics at 50fps, requiring only a single core 1.2GHz processor and 512 MB of memory
  
• Offers n-body physics for a 2000 lightyear universe on a 0.1mm resolution
  
• Has no problem with 5000-part ships
  
• Has built-in multiplayer support
  
• Comes with a special LEGACY module that makes porting over games that run on the Unity engine a trivial task
  

I know this is all BS, but so is Squad switching over to the Unreal engine, so why stop there?

/thread lol

Really though, that's the problem. Not only has nobody given any real stats that prove any other engine would be better or worse but we continue to discuss the merits of doing so based on whims and fancy, theoretical performance gains based on marking slogans and supposed "features" that an engine offers. This kind of thread comes up often, and people who have no idea how game engines work (no offense intended) try to promote one over the other based on some supposed reasoning that a particular one will work better for KSP.

Let's discuss some things that actually matter:

• Is an engine switch feasible? NO!
  
• Can another engine give better performance?
  
  • Graphics? Debatable. Some engines are more geared towards graphics, but they are specifically designed and wouldn't work well in the KSP environment. Graphics aren't really a problem for most KSP users
    
  • Physics? With the coming changes in Unity, it will be hard to find a better engine physics wise. 600 interconnected rigid bodies isn't going to run well on any engine, even if they tout having great physics.
    
  • Modding? Unity is 100x easier than anything I've seen to work with, without it, our modding community would be almost non-existent.
    

  [*]Can another engine handle what KSP does? Unknown, as nothing of this scale and complexity has been done before. Every single engine/game that touts physics is either highly limited or very situational, which wouldn't work well with KSP.

  [*]Is Unity right for the job? It's probably the best option at the moment besides a custom engine.

Edited April 23, 2014 by Xaiier

[rtxoff]

Xaiier, i fully agree with you.

This thread is a laugh from the beginning.

[Lifeforce87]

In my opinion the Unreal engine just exist to look good and to make simple egoshooter. Iam not an expert when it comes to game engines, but it allways looked like Unreal just knows how to draw beautiful stuff on your screen.

And btw, seriously, when guys think this thread is useless, then dont reply to it.. its just a "what if" discussion and not a suggestion to switch to another engine.

Just my 2 cents

Edited April 23, 2014 by Lifeforce87

[tygoo7]

/thread lol

Really though, that's the problem. Not only has nobody given any real stats that prove any other engine would be better or worse but we continue to discuss the merits of doing so based on whims and fancy, theoretical performance gains based on marking slogans and supposed "features" that an engine offers. This kind of thread comes up often, and people who have no idea how game engines work (no offense intended) try to promote one over the other based on some supposed reasoning that a particular one will work better for KSP.

Let's discuss some things that actually matter:

• Is an engine switch feasible? NO!
  
• Can another engine give better performance?
  
  • Graphics? Debatable. Some engines are more geared towards graphics, but they are specifically designed and wouldn't work well in the KSP environment. Graphics aren't really a problem for most KSP users
    
  • Physics? With the coming changes in Unity, it will be hard to find a better engine physics wise. 600 interconnected rigid bodies isn't going to run well on any engine, even if they tout having great physics.
    
  • Modding? Unity is 100x easier than anything I've seen to work with, without it, our modding community would be almost non-existent.
    

  [*]Can another engine handle what KSP does? Unknown, as nothing of this scale and complexity has been done before. Every single engine/game that touts physics is either highly limited or very situational, which wouldn't work well with KSP.

  [*]Is Unity right for the job? It's probably the best option at the moment besides a custom engine.

^

This is also my opinion

[Rowsdower]

I know Unreal has more use than for what I'm about to say, but when you mention Unreal, the first thing I think of is square-jawed, roided-up solders. That in mind, if Squad ever decides to go with Unreal, I'm glad that the devs will finally be able to deliver the dark and gritty version of KSP we've all been waiting for.*

*Totally not happening.

[Red Iron Crown]

I don't foresee any engine changes until version 2.0, which may or may not happen.

I suspect that Unity was chosen mostly for cost reasons, as I understand it KSP was a bit of a "pet project" with a tiny budget at the start, without any guarantee of any return on investment. If the devs had insisted on a better, more costly engine it might never have gotten off the ground.

From most aspects other than initial cost, Unity is not a great fit for KSP. It is outclassed in physics performance by engines with more modern versions of PhysX or other physics libraries, and Unity's big selling point (many supported platforms) is underutilized in KSP. But so much has been invested in bending Unity to KSP's requirements that it would be a mountain of work to bring another engine just up to par with what we have now, let alone add any new features. So I'm content with Unity and its limitations as it gives us the best game experience and least amount of time until feature-completeness for KSP.

[Captain Sierra]

How well does Unreal perform when it runs a map that measures several billion meters in diameter?

I'd guess nobody knows.

That's a legitimate question. Even Unity can't run a solar system. Remember that Unity does not natively support curved terrain meshes (i.e. planets) so the devs had to code a workaround (PQS). In the performance argument, I would say in conjunction with NVidia, it can do some really awesome physics stuff.

That's some serious physics work there. So much so that on closer look, you can see some noticable FPS drops in there, and this is at PAX. It's not unreasonable to assume the provided rigs for demos at PAX are better than 50%+ of the KSP player base. This does come with some hefty overhead. Now, these physics are obviously geared towards destruction, because that's pretty. I have no clue how this would handle if you wanted things to NOT break.

So, crashing your space station into the Mun would be one heck of a show. Beyond that, I don't know how well the physics handles other cirumstances such as what KSP needs (physics of launches, planes, etc.).

[Xaiier]

That's a legitimate question. Even Unity can't run a solar system. Remember that Unity does not natively support curved terrain meshes (i.e. planets) so the devs had to code a workaround (PQS). In the performance argument, I would say in conjunction with NVidia, it can do some really awesome physics stuff.

That's some serious physics work there. So much so that on closer look, you can see some noticable FPS drops in there, and this is at PAX. It's not unreasonable to assume the provided rigs for demos at PAX are better than 50%+ of the KSP player base. This does come with some hefty overhead. Now, these physics are obviously geared towards destruction, because that's pretty. I have no clue how this would handle if you wanted things to NOT break.

So, crashing your space station into the Mun would be one heck of a show. Beyond that, I don't know how well the physics handles other cirumstances such as what KSP needs (physics of launches, planes, etc.).

*sigh*

Destruction != Physics

All destruction systems cheat the system massively by faking as much as possible. Yes, the object get sliced up and made into little pieces that use a physics engine, but that isn't related to the rest of the physics engine. This is an instance of a custom designed physics engine in a limited environment to get a cool effect, precisely the same way the Frostbite engine does it. Yes, you could have KSP objects that break apart like this, even in Unity, but that has no effect on the general limitation of cylindrical bodies and the calculations necessary to stick 100 of them together into a rocket. A physics engine is not a magical reality simulating machine, it's just a method of faking various things in ways that work together nicely so that in the course of a typical game, you can suspend belief enough to think everything you are seeing makes sense, so a capability for one engine to do "destruction" means nothing next to its capability to do other things.

[NoMrBond]

Isn't PhysX bound to NVIDIA cards? If so, then those of us using ATI/AMD hardware would see absolutely no improvement regardless of whether KSP stayed on Unity or went to Unreal.

The CUDA accelerated version is bound to NVIDIA cards (although some new features, like HairWorks, seem to also support OpenCL), however there is also a CPU branch of PhysX which is implemented on everything else.

Unity only implements the CPU branch because it works across all their supported platforms (Unity 4 uses CPU PhysX 2.8.4, while Unity 5 is going to use CPU PhysX 3.3, hopefully the threaded version too so no more single physics thread limitation)

The PhysX upgrade to v3.3 is a big step up, if Unity 5 also supported a native cylinder collider so they didn't have to be calculated as mesh colliders this would also be better

[Heagar]

Every game-engine has it's limitations. And we should not forget: Even open world games like "GTA", "ARMA" or "Skyrim" have only to care about a few square-miles.

KSP has to display multiple whole planets and astroids (without a "loading" screen when you zoom in/out e.g.), the trajectory of them as well as your missions underway. And you wouldn't like faster physics-rendering if your munbase is sunken into the ground by your next visit or the kraken eats your ship during a landing-attempt on eeloo. Not funny too: If new parts with new fuctions would not behave as they are intended.

And what better graphics? Does somebody really want a 100 GB monster-installation witch takes 16 GB RAM and needs a high-end graphic card to operate the game just for the looks? I guess not ...

Currently the game is stable and make a lot of fun. That is all i care about.

The dev's may be able to optimize things by coding, but that - in my opinion - should be done when the game is completed.

[Bilfr3d]

I don't really have any problems with KSP being in Unity as it is. The only problem I do have is that Unity doesn't multi-thread the games and has a RAM allocation block, as there is no 64 or 32-bit version. I'm not even sure if the Unreal engine would fix this, as I have looked into it. The graphics aren't any better than they are because of the RAM limitations and no multi-threading, because if graphics were cranked to full in the unity engine, KSP would crap itself when it tried to load. I'm not sure if Unreal supports 64 vs. 32 bit, because going 64-bit would remove those RAM limitations anyway. Don't quote me on this though.

[Red Iron Crown]

I don't really have any problems with KSP being in Unity as it is. The only problem I do have is that Unity doesn't multi-thread the games and has a RAM allocation block, as there is no 64 or 32-bit version. I'm not even sure if the Unreal engine would fix this, as I have looked into it. The graphics aren't any better than they are because of the RAM limitations and no multi-threading, because if graphics were cranked to full in the unity engine, KSP would crap itself when it tried to load. I'm not sure if Unreal supports 64 vs. 32 bit, because going 64-bit would remove those RAM limitations anyway. Don't quote me on this though.

Unity and KSP are multithreaded, and always have been. It's just that the physics thread so dominates the other threads in processing performance that the whole program feels like a single threaded one.

[rkman]

That's a legitimate question. Even Unity can't run a solar system. Remember that Unity does not natively support curved terrain meshes (i.e. planets) so the devs had to code a workaround (PQS). In the performance argument, I would say in conjunction with NVidia, it can do some really awesome physics stuff.

True. For such a large game space, floating origin is pretty much mandatory. The only game/engine/thing that i know that has been using floating origin for quite some time is Celestia (though it barely qualifies as a game engine and is not advertized as such). A newcomer still in early development that uses floating origin is Space Engine.

Doing ksp in the Unreal engine would certainly not be just a matter of writing a bunch of scripts and creating the art assets, as it would for most Unreal based games.

I think physics engines such as physx/unreal/Havoc/etc are designed for special effects like explosions and collapsing buildings, where bits and pieces have to bounce around in semi-realistic fashion, not for scientifically accurate physics simulation. It does involve simple physics, but i don't think it is well suited to do some sort of poor man's Finite Element Analysis that ksp uses physx for (wrt to parts that make up a rocket). But probably no game engine is well suited for that.

[Magnet_man16]

It would have looked good but not of had the gameplay element. Its about getting a balance.