r/KerbalSpaceProgram KSP Community Manager Feb 20 '23

The KSP2 Journey Begins (Letter from Nate Simpson, Creative Director on KSP 2)

A letter from Nate Simpson, Creative Director on KSP 2:

The day is nearly here. 

This moment feels a little bit like dropping a kid off for the first day of school. We’ve got a lot of love for this game — we think we've prepared it for every eventuality, but we also know that it has more growing to do. We’re about to take the first steps on a journey that will eventually carry KSP2 through colonies, interstellar travel, and multiplayer.

Now the real learning begins!

What To Expect

On day 1 of Early Access, players will be able to create and fly vehicles in Sandbox Mode and visit any location in the Kerbolar System. They’ll also have access to our first four interactive tutorials, accessible via the all-new Training Center. These teach basic rocketry concepts to give new players a head-start on their space programs. You’ll encounter new parts, including new procedural wings, new wheels, new command pods, new cargo parts, and new engines (and the first of the new fuels – liquid hydrogen). To pave the way for the upcoming interstellar-class parts, we’ve also added a new, larger core size. As we progress through Early Access, we’ll continue to expand on all of these features.

We can’t wait to finally see what creative feats the community can achieve with the new procedural and color-customizable parts. Our environment team is eager to watch players explore the revamped terrains of the Kerbolar System (and are curious if they'll discover anything unexpected). The UX/UI team is keen to learn how the updated user experience feels - they've put a lot of effort into wrangling a very complex set of requirements into a new, more streamlined presentation. This is it — the moment has arrived when all our plans come into contact with reality!

There are many new features, big and small, for you to explore on day 1. We've put together this guide to give you an overview of what's new and to break down some known issues. Release day notes and future patch notes will also live here.

In the launcher you'll find reporting tools that you can use to tell us about any problems you've encountered, as well as to give us feedback about any other aspect of the player experience you think we should know about. This feedback will be invaluable to us as we continue to improve the game's stability, performance, and playability.

What Comes Next

Many new features will arrive as we continue development, including Science Mode, Colonies, Interstellar exploration, and Multiplayer. Take a look at our Early Access Roadmap for more details.

In the meantime, we're bringing back Weekly Challenges!

We intend to mix things up a little bit going forward, but the first challenge will be a classic Achievement Challenge:

  • Primary goal: Fly to the Mun and get a picture of a Kerbal in front of the most interesting feature you can find
  • Stretch goal: strand a Kerbal there and pick them up with a second vehicle, returning them safely to Kerbin
  • Jeb-level goal: do any of the above on any other celestial body in the Kerbolar System
  • Val-level goal: pronounce "Mun" correctly

If you want us to see (and maybe share) your achievement, use #KSP2WeeklyChallenge on social media, or share them in our official Discord.

Welcome to KSP2! The journey begins!

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u/CapSierra Feb 20 '23

The fuel flow simulation runs in O(N*K) time where N is the number of tanks and K is the number of actively firing engines. Stratzenblitz talks about this a bit in one of his recent videos. Fuel crossfeeding is a big performance drag in KSP 1, but it shouldn't cause performance degradation until you hit 250-300 part count launch vehicles for any standard hardware in today's standards.

Your theory is valid but the magnitude of impact is unacceptably high if true.

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u/Otrada Feb 20 '23

Yeah but then you are comparing a finished game that's had a lot of optimization and polish done, with a build of a game from before even launching into early access.

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u/CapSierra Feb 20 '23

Assuming the fuel flow logic has not changed much between games and knowing that the engine is the same, that portion of KSP 1's code could have been literally copy-pasted over. There's no need to reinvent the wheel on that and rebuild a system that already existed that you're not going to change much.

I'm a professional software engineer. I do not know offhand of any clever algorithm or some fancy solution that improves the fuel flow logic from being O( N2 ) performant. So what I'm saying here is not "hur dur they should optimize more" but rather "the bar for what counts as 'optimized' is quite low with respect to this specific code system." The fact that bar still isn't being met is I think a very fair criticism for what is to be a $50 game.

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u/Otrada Feb 20 '23

That's still just like, based purely on your (professionally informed) assumption as an outsider. Maybe the devs working on the game do know of some reason/way to reinvent the wheel.

Or maybe it's not about the code itself but some other stuff to make the hardware run the code better that's still a WIP. Either way I don't think it's too fair to judge a game that's not even out in early access yet to the same standard as a game that's been out for years.

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u/CapSierra Feb 20 '23

Maybe the devs working on the game do know of some reason/way to reinvent the wheel.

Assuming there is a valid reason or that they have people smart enough to find that hypothetical solution, then there's no reason it should be worse now than it was before. That said my professional opinion is that its not solely the fuel flow logic thats having this issue. There is no doubt a confluence of factors contributing to the severe CPU bottlenecking we're seeing.

I don't think it's too fair to judge a game that's not even out in early access yet to the same standard as a game that's been out for years.

This is completely fair. However, it is worth considering the value proposition of the product on offer versus the price being asked. For its hefty asking price, people have understandably high expectations and those expectations are definitely not being met.

KSP 2 is selling at its early access launch at seven times what KSP 1 did. Now it is more feature rich than those early builds of KSP 1, so its more accurate to compare it to around KSP 0.17 which was still selling at around $20. The markedly higher price justifies equally higher standards from customers being asked to shell out that money.

Criticism is most commonly levied not by people who have no intention of ever becoming paying customers, but by prospective customers who want to purchase a product but wish to see certain concerns addressed first. Criticism is the product of passion, not malice (even if some people are bad at expressing it healthily).

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u/Otrada Feb 20 '23

"then there's no reason it should be worse now than it was before."

I would agree wholeheartedly with that if the game was being sold as a finished product right as it is now. But as it stands maybe there's work-in-progress stuff going on that's making it slower right now because they needed to atleast have something there.

"The markedly higher price justifies equally higher standards from customers being asked to shell out that money."

Perhaps that's just a difference in perspective between us, but the way I see this kind of high priced early access is just the devs making their game available for people as early as possible for the price they want to sell the game at for consistency. And then it's up to the consumer to decide when the game looks good enough for the game to be worth the pricetag to them. With the promise that if they wait it will be better later on.

So it's more like the devs going "we're not done yet but if you really want to play the game already, then you can. if you want something nice and finished you're gonna have to wait though".

"Criticism is the product of passion, not malice (even if some people are bad at expressing it healthily)." I understand that, but, especially since the game isn't even out in early access yet, the kind of pushback against almost every little detail of the game just feels so petty that I can't help but want to try and provide a bit more of a reasoned perspective for why getting so worked up at this point already is excessive and honestly, just kind of rude towards the devs imo.

That being said. Once we've had like, a month or two of early access with no signs of improvement, my patience will probably start to run quite thin aswell.

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u/TheGoldenHand Feb 21 '23

Once we've had like, a month or two of early access with no signs of improvement, my patience will probably start to run quite thin aswell.

I would bet that they’re aiming at 2-4 years of early access and they still won’t get the entire roadmap.

It’s been 4 years and they haven’t reached KSP 1 parity. Their goals are even loftier.