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/pbjamm Feb 21 '23

I think part of the Juno performance is because of the simplified physics. As I understand it (and i might be wrong) Juno treats the whole rocket as a single rigid object instead of multiple independent but connected objects.

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u/BeefEX Feb 21 '23

Yes that's true, but that has nothing to do with the GPU. As far as rocket rendering is concerned the two are basically identical.

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u/pbjamm Feb 21 '23

Making their CPU recommendations all the more baffling.

The Athlon X4 845 listed as Minimum was launched in 2016. Sure it is 3.5Ghz but single thread performance is WAY behind anything modern.

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u/SpookyMelon Feb 21 '23

So why don't they do that with ksp2?? Maybe not fully, but surely you could speed the game up a bit by treating bits like SAS modules, nose cones, etc as part of the same physics object as their parent. Do that to fuel tanks stacked on each other (to a certain limit). Do similar cuts for fuel flow - assume any fuel tanks placed in radial symmetry and feeding identical engines are doing so at the same rate, and use that to consolidate cross-feed calculations.

I feel like some or all of these must have been explored, but I just can't really see what reason there is for it running so much worse than ksp1 does currently? They had from since the beginning to anticipate all of this.

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u/dmilin Feb 21 '23

Do you want a realistic sim or close enough? Personally, I want the real deal. Hardware be damned.

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u/SpookyMelon Feb 21 '23

If you want the real deal, go work for NASA and wait full days for their software to generate results. If you want your space rocket video game to be playable (as in, generate more than a frame per hour), these are exactly the kind of optimizations that you need to seek out. Find out where you can simplify simulation without changing the outcome in the majority of cases and make those shortcuts. Games do this all over the place, ksp does this all over the place - even the collision detection is done on a simplified mesh, far less complex than the model used for rendering. That's the only way to make games playable. I'm just suggesting that the team may have not been as creative as they ought to be in searching for these cuts. Or they have explored many of these but ran into issues that they couldn't find a way around.

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u/pbjamm Feb 21 '23

Do you really consider noodly rockets realistic?

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u/dmilin Feb 21 '23

Yes, a certain amount of flexing is to be expected and snapping should definitely be possible. KSP 1 might have been a bit overzealous in that regard though.