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Comment by gzu | Hacker News Reader

Will be excited to see if it uses a re-vamped game engine. KSP 1 is based on Unity and bottlenecks at single core cpu.

From the extant details it's hard to tell if it's even a new game.

The cinematic launch video is pretty funky but is clearly marked as "Not actual gameplay". The press materials talk about new parts and new places to visit, all of which could simply indicate a very large expansion pack on the original. There's nothing in the accompanying "developer journey" video to suggests it's a new base game either, let alone a new engine; quite the opposite: everyone is wearing Unity t-shirts.

I'm hoping it's both, because the current gameplay vastly exceeds the game's performance envelope. In particular, the physics engine: I get 5 frames per second when docking large space stations, and KSP is running its physics engine on two CPU cores out of 10, and not even warming up a GPU.

"Not actual gameplay" might just mean it's all theoretically possible in game and rendered in-engine, but they staged everything.

Or the whole trailer might be rendered in Maya.

i find it somewhat amusing that they couldn't get smoke right even in the cinematic render. but there were a lot of large craft in there, so maybe they got a better physic engine for the rigid body parts

The graphics from the "pre-alpha" footage in their developer video are significantly worse than the trailer (although still a step up from KSP1)

The "not actual gameplay" disclaimer was only shown onscreen during that brief silhouette shot of the craft flying over the moon. Does it apply to the entire trailer?

Unfortunately, looks like KSP 2 will also be using Unity: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315...

Won't be a problem if they're using ECS and DOTS

What do those acronyms mean?

ECS = Entity Component System. DOTS = Data Oriented Tech Stack, which is the new implementation of ECS in Unity.

Current KSP is plagued by performance issues during advanced gameplay, particularly threading granularity issues with physics simulation when running large craft such as space stations or complex rocketry. There are some amazing KSP videos on YouTube with orbital construction on a grand scale, gigantic interplanetary vehicles, complex planetary bases and so on; their dirty secret being that the original gameplay is actually occurring at a painfully frustrating <10 fps and has been massively sped up for consumption.

GP is suggesting that using DOTS those issues can be relieved, by making more efficient use of available system resources.

refs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system

https://unity.com/dots

ECS and DOTS aren't quite ready for prime time by Unity's own standards so there aren't many games actually shipping using ECS or DOTs because the API isn't stable.

As a game eveloper I was hoping to see they might make the switch to UE4 but guess they have too many solutions in Unity for that to make sense.

I was hoping they’d switch to Nintendo Switch :-)

KSP2 is still based on Unity, but Unity has changed a lot throughout the years. (It's like how Apex Legends and Half Life 2 use the "same" engine). The new entity-component-system (supposedly) makes it much easier to write games with a job oriented approach that scales to multiple cores very well.

AFAIK they switched to a multithreaded physics engine some time ago, during one of the Unity version bumps. Can't test it now, but my vague memory of looking at htop when playing recently seems to agree with that.

from the dev interview [1] it looks like they are still using Unity for KSP2?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wmJlnTqjSg

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