Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fifer82 | Hacker News Reader

I really love Kerbal Space Program but I stopped playing a couple of years back. Unity is really terrible. I remember landing 3 pieces of a moon base, and I was getting like 3fps... After another 3 weeks of making a space station, again was getting 5fps.

The funny thing was, I went out and splashed 1.5k on a new PC just for Kerbal, I loaded my save file of my moon base, and now I had 7fps....

Absolutely useless. KSP is like a Mr Universe Body Builder wearing a 3 year old girl's dress.

View on HN

Unity gets bad rep the same way FL studio (in 00s) or any other accessible creative tools do. Because they're the most accessible tools for beginners, they attract beginners and they use it to develop a lot of beginner-level products with all the downsides; however, these tools are quite capable of achieving AAA results in professional help.

Unity has nothing to do with KSP being laggy. KSP is a very ambitious game written by a beginner team; without Unity it couldn't have been made at all.

It's not really an argument against Unity per se, but low KSP performance had everything to do with that engine - because it ended up being CPU-bound through single-threaded physics. This problem is now solved, from what I remember.

That's everything to do with correct usage of the engine. Unity's PhysX is a general one-size-fits-all solution, which is not suitable for advanced physics-based game like KSP. Using it is only acceptable for prototype; they should've written their own physics, which suits their needs, and make it multi-threaded, and they should've done it in any game engine. In fact, many developers I know that worked with physics-based game mechanics have done just that - and none of them had requirements as significant as KSP.

I have not yet played a Unity game which doesn't have the "unity look and feel". I don't think anyone is going to be able to convince me otherwise. I am happy to purchase a modern (in the last 3 months) popular unity game tonight. If you can think of one that doesn't run like a Flash SWF, I will buy it.

And how would you know what engine was the game built with anyway? If you're relying on the Unity log splash screen, then indeed you only see games developed by beginner teams who can't even afford a paid license.

Can't you tell? I can't tell the difference between Lumberyard, Crytek, Unreal (I could Unreal until 2012ish), but I always know a unity game because it looks and runs like shit.

OK, so when you see a game that looks like shit, you have a hypothesis that it's a Unity game, and vice versa.

How, exactly, do you confirm these?

- Hollow Knight

- Hearthstone

- Night in the Woods

- Hidden Folks

- Enter the Gungeon

- Superhot

- Ori and the Blind Forest

- Broforce

- Grow Home

- Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime

There're these, for a start. (Though I don’t know why "modern" is qualified as being within three months.) Perhaps the problem is that no one can recognize a game made with Unity at a glance? The cheaper, lousier games can’t or don’t pay to remove the "Made with Unity" splash, so Unity has acquired something of an [image problem].

[image problem]: http://www.thejimquisition.com/unity-has-an-image-problem-th...

I have a ~5-year old PC that was around $1,250 new. KSP still runs without issues. I don't know the frame rate but it's not low enough to affect performance in any meaningful way.

More importantly, as others have stated, the performance has really improved over the last 12-18 months. Give it a shot again and you might be surprised.

KSP is laggy because it's a ridiculously detailed physics simulation. This has nothing to do with Unity.

(And i say this as someone who hates Unity for the actual graphics handling bugs it has.)

Maybe it's laggy because apps in Unity are written in c# instead of c+?

I don't think there's any reason why C# can't be comparable to C++, or any reason to think a programmer using C++ would be able to write significantly more efficient code than if they were using C#.

We're not talking about Python here, C# is a JIT compiled language not an interpreted one. The performance could be roughly comparable given the same code.

True, but Unity is still using an old Mono runtime.

I think they actually just released a new version that supports a more newer runtime but I doubt KSP upgraded.

A lot of AAA games use scripting languages for implementing game logic (notably Lua), even if the heavy lifting (graphics, physics, AI, etc...) is done with C++.

It has absolutely everything to do with Unity - or at least it had, when Unity 4 single-threaded physics engine was used. AFAIK KSP now has a properly multi-threaded physics engine, and works much faster.

I understand what you are saying, but the latest version is a "big leap for kerbalkind". You should give it a try again. When I have time, I play it on a mid-range laptop.

They really improved performance drastically last year. It's totally playable on a Mac mini even.

Are you sure there isn't something else going on?

I played KSP all the way up until 1.0 on a $900 Thinkpad x220, and I was usually getting 15-20 FPS. My old $1.5k-ish gaming PC was getting a nice solid 60fps until I started making launchpad monstrosities. So I find it hard to believe that your new $1.5k PC is actually struggling with KSP under "typical usage," as opposed to some weird corner case in your save or just a really huge moon base.

About a year ago they updated to unity5 and framerates are wonderful now, just for ref.

That was when the game used Unity 4? KSP used to have a single-threaded physics engine. AFAIR they replaced it now, so it should handle much more complex objects without destroying the framerate.

What are your system specs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com