I also have heard the rumors that the team was not treated well, and that the game was never really the focus of the company. I think it may have been a side project of one of the developers on a totally unrelated product (ie. not even a game).
I second this. I've used many graphics improvement mods in the past. The good thing is, graphics quality is almost an orthogonal performance factor for the game - it's mostly CPU bound due to physics computation anyway.
What I'd love to see is more realistic FX (flames, particle systems, explosions) and better lightning and shadows. Especially the latter would make other worlds more beautiful.
> I think it may have been a side project of one of the developers on a totally unrelated product (ie. not even a game).
The story goes more-less like this: Squad is a marketing company. One of their employees was burning out and wanted to leave, and they offered him to let him develop his side project if he stays. This side project grew into Kerbal Space Program, and now is the most recognizable product of the company.
As for the more recent news about mistreatment of KSP team, this is a completely separate story (and to this day I'm not really sure how much truth there is to it; back when I hung out on /r/KSP the issue was quite muddy).
How long is a developer expected to keep improving a game? Maybe it is the old console gamer in me, but it wasn't that long ago that a game developer was done with a game when it was released. This game has been public for 6 years, been on Steam for 4 years, and been out of beta for 2 years. I don't get how customers can complain about a lack of commitment to the game especially considering the low price the game was usually offered at. I wouldn't blame Take-Two one bit for trying turn a bigger profit with more paid content or a complete sequel.
KSP as it first hit Steam was fun, but obviously incomplete. KSP 1.0 was viable as a finished product, but had obvious, planned upgrades unfinished. After-release support was pretty obviously planned from the beginning.
As for how long, though, I don't know. I'm exceedingly happy with the KSP I got for my money, and unlike some games they could have quit support before now without upsetting me. So as long as Take-Two keeps a decent business model, I'll happily pay for further content.
It's actually the opposite, bug fixes get deferred in favor of more features. Fixes make your player base happy, but they already paid and are therefore not worth any more money, new features drive sales.
Not to mention a lot of the good mods are still on like 1.6 or something because obviously no one is going to diligently update their mod over the course of ten years or however long Mojang wants to keep this up.
I've never seen most of Minecraft's newer stuff for this exact reason. I played enough to get pretty deep into FTB and the other large mod packs, and pretty quickly realized modders put out both content and bugfixes faster than Mojang itself. At that point, you might as well just consider the 'real' game a particularly shoddy branch of mods.
My personal guess for the future is that Kerbals will take off as a franchise, maybe even a movie, who knows. Lets face it, kerbals are just frickin cute :-)
With the exception of perhaps some bug fixes if necessary, KSP 1.3 is done. Stick a fork in it and start work on something else.
I mean, this is how my modded KSP looked back in time of 0.25C: https://i.imgur.com/yBahDMr.png. I could name AAA space sims that look worse (esp. in terms of immersion).
Sit me down in a room of 20 games, and tell me to identify unity games by simply playing each computer. On the 20% chance that I can't instantly tell by looking, a wee swipe of the mouse and the complete lack of responsiveness finalizes all I need for 100% success rate.
That said, it's not easy though it is certainly doable; it basically means you're using Unity largely as a "rendering pipeline" which may or may not be overkill, depending on the use case/game in question.
You're right -- there's very little written on the topic. Though Unity has a fantastic community, and a large swath of information & user help to be found, a lot of it is directed at the newer/simpler developer (or mobile specifically).
Much of our work, and findings, has been derived from running our own tests & benchmarks as well as reading research/white-papers. In general, we've kind of found that many [advanced] game dev related topics are not well publicized or are fairly tightly-held. Our best source of information for things like highly advanced pathfinding, or low-level & high-volume multi-agent modeling/simulation strategies, have come directly from published academic research which has also been a treasure-trove of information.
We've read more research the last year or two than we did through all of school and the first ~10-15 years of our careers combined! =)
I guess most of the physic slowdown is some improvised custom code around joints that makes the solver choke
Say what you will about No Man's Sky, but that game was gorgeous, which contributed in no small part to its widespread interest. Now imagine how fantastic a game with those graphics but with KSP's mechanics would be.
The very act of double clicking the icon to boot up unity === terrible performance.
"Maybe she's born with it" was a funny joke I recall when working in Dundee on a Unity Project. I remember moving to a temporary role (More to fill the team for the investors to smile) and they were using Lumberyard and what a total difference.
Unity is a poor mans game development solution and that might have perks, but a game the scope of KSP deserves way way way way more respect.
Unity can do far better graphics than KSP has e.g. https://unity3d.com/pages/adam. The fact that there are numerous mods which vastly improve the graphics of KSP is pretty good evidence of this!
Where Unity can be blamed for KSP problems is the constant stutters due to GC - Unity uses an ancient garbage collector. Hopefully that's going to get better soon - apparently there was some licensing problem keeping Unity on an ancient version of Mono, now that MS own Xamarin that's probably not a problem.
Essentially, most (unity) games don't allow their users to create content, whereas the essential part of KSP is the creation and simulation of lots of bodies.
I've definitely experienced a substantial slowdown when many entities are on the screen at the same time.
I'm not sure if KSP makes use of the normal Unity physics engine, a third-party one, or something developed in-house.
[0]http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/139128-...
Well-crafted art assets are far more important to the look of a game than the specific engine that is used. The reason some "lesser" platforms like WebGL or the various open source game engines look so bad is because they are far more accessible to beginners, beginners who don't have access to good assets.
The big thing that I'd like to see are atmospheric effects and better rocket plumes. I very much agree that the simple aesthetic works really well for the game, but there's a lot that could be done.
https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/2lryka/...
Would a remake really be necessary for that? Sounds to me like it'd be more of an art asset replacement/upgrade (which was already in the works at one point, IIRC). Modders have already been pumping out all sorts of art assets with pretty high visual quality, and KSP's already on a modern engine (Unity 5).
The graphics are already pretty modern. Maybe not photorealistic, but KSP's more cartoony graphics are part of the charm anyway. If I wanted hyperrealism, I'd be playing Orbiter or installing that one spaceflight mod for X-Plane.