Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sakes | Hacker News Reader

Video games can be good. Video games can be bad. Specifically pertaining to minecraft, I've never found a game that has the potential to offer so many educational experiences. You can start off stacking blocks with your kid. Fast forward a few years and you've downloaded something like computer craft and you are now creating your own game skins and literally programming simple AIs whether they are bots or enemy mobs.

View on HN

It's a much older demographic, but Kerbal Space Program is educational in a similarly sneaky way. First you build some rockets and they don't go very far, then you build some better ones, and at a certain point you wind up learning about orbital mechanics and rocketry equations. It really changed the way I think about space, while procrastinating!

I haven't made mods for it yet, but there are people that go down that rabbit hole too. Quite a bargain for the $30 I paid.

And then you build planes...

When I first bought KSP, I had no idea you could even get into orbit. So many different levels of accomplishments to strive for, especially now with career mode.

Oh yes, for me it was best money spent for a video game ever. I've clocked almost 400 hours and I still really didn't get into making planes - I'm launching rockets, building space stations and (with help of a bunch of cool mods) setting up colonies on moons.

This game has it all - you need to learn being precise (targeted landings if you want to build a structure somewhere or picked up kerbonauts you crashed the previous time), you need to plan and do logistics (hello fuel shipments), and you need patience (rendezvous and docking). And, as OP said, you quickly end up learning a lot about orbital mechanics, rocketry and space exploration. You don't need to know the maths, but you'll end up learning it anyway, because formulas are the easiest way to compress your intuition about "why bigger ships need helluva bigger rockets" or "why when I go faster I go slower".

Oh, and a fun thing I observed watching the community - because KSP runs on Unity 4, which has an unusable 64bit version for Windows, and the game itself starts quickly eating your RAM when you go for installing part or visual mods to the point of crashing the 32bit version, a lot of people install Linux for the first time in their lives just to play a working 64bit version of KSP. Yay for more education :).

I'm just starting on that game (ThinkPad T440p didn't have the gpu to run it...X250 does). But I run Windows as host OS to avoid drivers and battery issues. Do you know if the game will be OK inside VirtualBox or VMware? (Yes I could just try it but commenting is easier.) Will I not hit RAM issues if I don't install visual mods? (It renders shitty enough already; don't need to slow it down more.)

I don't now how good is the virtualization nowadays; KSP is mostly CPU-bound anyway thanks to physics done in a single thread. You should be fine on Windows though, as long as you don't overdo it with parts mods. The magic boundary for 32bit processes is 3.2GB RAM (fire up Process Explorer after KSP loaded and see how much it uses). There's a trick you can use to get the game use only half of the memory (for some weird reason) - fire it up with --force-opengl command line parameter. This should let you install pretty much any visual mod you want and then quite a bunch of others. Some people also used to use texture compression mods. Either of those tricks may no longer be necessary though, because one of the recent updates got rid of the uncompressed textures in the game - but by that time I bought an SSD and installed a fresh Linux on it to play 64bit, so I don't know if the change helped.

Oof logistics. I have about a dozen nonfunctional satellites in orbit because I forgot to extend antennas before dropping them into orbit while using RemoteTech.

Happened to me too. Or even more often, I forgot to extend solar panels and ended up out of power. Only recently I had to fly a rescue mission and do an EVA to force-extend a panel from outside.

For those who don't know KSP mods, RemoteTech adds the requirement to maintain communication links (via powered antennas) in order to be able to control unmanned vehicles. You can create relays as well (usually the first thing you do is to launch a geostationary comm network over the home planet), and the mod can account for the speed-of-light delay if you so choose.

Combine it with bunch of other mods like Kerbal Attachment System (attaching and detaching parts by kerbonauts during EVA, including pipes that let you transfer resources without docking) and one of many life support mods, and suddenly you really have to think a lot about logistics in game.

> Video games can be good.

I challenge you to show me a way in which video games can be optimally good. Not just better than some carefully selected bad alternative, but better than any alternative. As in, actually a good thing to do of all options available.

Flight simulators for pilots.

That's a pretty silly thing to demand. There are very few things that most people find enjoyable which are "optimally good". Requiring something to be "optimally good" in order to do it would make a quite dull life for most of us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com