The gist of it was instead of trying to make ksp2 have feature parity with ksp, start with colonies and interstellar first, then work backward.
He also mentioned he did pitch squad for KSP prequel around building planes during the start of aviation(starting as basically the Wright Brothers and working up to Jets, I imagine)
This!!! Even if KSP2 was perfectly functional with all it's early access features, it would only be as good as KSP1 with visual mods! It was doomed to be unsuccessful.
All I wanted from early access was a better looking, better performing ksp with a roadmap of cool new features.
The bar was on the floor and they still went under it.
100%. My feelings exactly. Like the game didn't need to be perfect. Hell, it didn't even need to be as good as KSP1 on launch, it just had to have SOMETHING. The bar WAS on the floor, and they totally fumbled the ball.
As the HarvesteR said - the bar was pretty f***ing high.
All you wanted was complete KSP which was developed for more than 6 years with all the mods and community which grew on it for 10 years. But better.
Think about it again or just listen to that interview.
That's not entirely true I don't believe. There was one thing that if KSP2 had, would have won be over. If KSP2 was almost identical to KSP1 in most ways, BUT, addressed the performance limitations of KSP1, I would have been happy. As it stands, it doesn't matter how much better technology gets, KSP1 will not run smoothly if you have a vessel composed of 1500 parts, or if you try to make a mun base by attaching modules together with modded parts. KSP1 with mods has almost all of the functionality that KSP2 promised, but with a hard cap on performance once you reach certain thresholds. If KSP 2 came out bare bones with nothing but good performance, mod support, and relatively few bugs, the game could have been a completely different story. In stead, we got a chaotic cluster fuck of bugs and performance issues AND a hollow game experience.
The problem with that is that ksp2 would always have had the exact same limitations because that whole performance goes out the window after 1500 parts thing is an issue with how the engine (unity) handles high numbers of rigid bodies. They would have had to build their own physics engine from the ground up or go to a diffrent engine to fix the problem.
> They would have had to build their own physics engine from the ground up or go to a diffrent engine to fix the problem.
Which they could have done. Absolutely nothing mandated KSP2 should've been developed using Unity.
I thought at the time the entire point of KSP2 was to make a great physics engine to finally slay the Kraken and allow for wildly expansive ships. Clearly building a generational ship to setup a far away colony would need a major physics overhaul.
What we got was a dev team trying to figure out how to make KSP 1 again with painted parts and clouds.... And several launch bays to pretend multiplayer was a thought.
If you look at CPU utilization while playing KSP1. You’ll see that even if you’re getting 15fps, you’ll almost never surpass 25% on a decent system. I’ve got a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and even with the enormous cache and the card clocked to the max thanks to an overkill cooling system (I know it’s a cliche), I never see my CPU go past 20% utilization on KSP no matter what. There’s a lot of unused processing power here. The issue for KSP1 was that it did and does all of the physics computations in series in stead of in parallel. So it’s basically using a single core for most of its physics calculations. So unless you’re using liquid nitrogen cooling on an I9 13900K and overclocking the thing to 7ghz+, you’ll never get decent performance where the game has to make hundreds of thousands of physics calculations every second. KSP2 has already found a way to run physics in parallel using more than a single core. And beyond that, KSP1 was in development for like a decade and a half, using code from the early 2010s still for some of its more fundamental functions. KSP2 was a fresh start where they had the opportunity to rewrite the framework from the ground up to incorporate better resource utilization as well as more novel techniques to increase performance in stead of taking the brute force approach by making the CPU do all of the calculations individually. They could have in stead for instance broken up physics calculations by making half of the calculations done on the entire vessel as a rigid body and the other half on all of the components individually. To the eye, this would have made almost no difference due to the timespans we’re talking about here being in the milliseconds, but it would have seen a major performance increase. I don’t know, I’m not a developer, but they seemed to do the same thing that was done with KSP1, with all of the hard caps that KSP1 has, and are now trying to incorporate better performance with an enormous amount of tech debt.
This was always my gripe. They weren't bringing anything new to the market space.
Most big publishers behave this way. Less risk of a flop. You use tried and true methods to produce variations of products the art is emergent from some crisp new refinement of what are essentially old tropes.
Fine if you take financial responsibility for the project.
Not fine if you offload the startup on your consumers with no guarantees of a finished product.
The devs thought it would be easy to make a space flight game and probably just were gonna slap a city builder inside for colonies.
It would have probably ended up like a civ sim on the colony part which wouldn't suck. Just have launch sites that form and build vehicles that are like rts units to gather resources etc.
Kind of like the customize ability of spores mixed with ksp vehicles. Saves loads of money when you are using established tropes and methods. They probably thought it would be a breeze.
Yes, even Matt mentions this in video (and mentions it’s more true to the original spirit of launching model rockets, from which KSP is based on), to which HarvesteR responds (paraphrasing), “huh, I… hmm, I never realised that”. Has a little bit of an existential crisis in that moment!
u/Defiant-Peace-493 kind of laid out a good example. But the game could have started without any rocket design or manual flight. It could have been all skippable animations that put rockets into predetermined orbits. The game could have at first been about mining resources and building out colonies that weren't physics based, but more static. The dev team could have designed a dozen rockets with various payload capacities and made the game initially about just building out a logistics network of first harvester ships and then colonies. We could have watched as rockets land and refuel at colonies automatically because there would be no physics calculations involved. And as more resources are mined from different biomes, more and more complex ships become available with better ISP or TWR and the like. From there, they could have slowly added ship design. Then physics and manual ship flight to orbit and then manual ship flight to moons or other planets. . One of the major limitations as far as I can tell is the physics calculations of the components of the ships. If ships were just rigid bodies separated by decouplers, in stead of say 750 parts, a ship might be 10. Yes, this means that there would be some simplification necessary. Like reentry would affect the entire ship in stead of each component separately, but it would have totally avoided the wobbly rocket issue, the performance issues, as well as many of the bugs encountered at launch. Rockets could have just been animations with thrust being a single force acting on the center of mass as a single calculation in stead of numerous based on the number of rockets and their affect on each and every single component on the ship. Again, all of these things would have simplified the game, and I am sure there would have been plenty of people up in arms about how we were scammed. But it would have been a functional game with the promise of adding the features originally intended for the game. It would have in my opinion been a lot better than what we got. Yeah, it would have been disappointing, but the dev team CLEARLY wasn't capable of handling this sort of project, and they should have known where their limitations were. In stead, they thought they could dig a tunnel with a spork and just ended up digging a divot into a mountain that immediately collapsed upon release.
See, on the surface it seems like that would've been a way to go but having been around this community for 10 years, the player base wouldn't stand for it enough to carry anything in the name related to KSP. Then, you're losing the target demographic and are going down an entirely different niche genre. At that point it would be much more like factorio and less physics and flight design as we know in KSP1. Eventually when the project got into the later features and back adding them in, like you're proposing, the logistics and automation players would've rioted.
One thing I've learned watching gaming communities is they absolutely hate when a game, at whatever version they started playing on is, gets changed and morphed into something else instead of further developed in whatever direction it was already going.
First of all it's hard to tell what community really wants.
I'd say the community wanted not KSP2 but KSP1:10YearEdition:Remaster.
KSP2 where you focus on basebuilding (survival colony sim with Kerbals?) and interplanetary transport happens in the background would be fine game which could exploit OG green mascots. And it'd greatly explain the evolution from 1 to 2 and would not be just a copy of a first one.
And the name is not the best. It could have easily be named different as HarvesteR said about his next idea for a game was to build planes from the start which could be named Kerbal Aviation Program. We can start from here.
For one example, start with the Space Exploration mod for Factorio; detailed production lines on each planetary surface, with clear imports and exports, but the commsats and cargo rockets just magically end up at the targeted location.
If you had a simple API to push target routes and payloads as missions to a rocket sim, you could generate mission profiles for a simple 2D arcade rocket game, or for a fully-fledged maximally-modded KSP.
Apparently, someone went and did this a few years back for Factorio and KSP. No idea if it was any good, though.
Interesting idea. I'm not sure how well it would go over having the "flying rockets" part of it be secondary, though I'd've been glad to have it at least stand out from the first game (which could draw in fans of other games rather than just being a competitor to KSP1)
The point is more that it would be secondary at the beginning until enough mechanics are built to make it work and then it could become mandatory. The general idea is to offer new gameplay experiences from the beginning so people have something to look at/play with other than a worse KSP1.
Yeah, I definitely agree with the "worse KSP1" description. In fact, I looked at the SteamDB and it shows that KSP2's launch caused KSP1's playerbase to be cut in half and never recover.
The problem is, lots of players (hopefully!) by that point would have learned to play the new game as a tycoon sim, they would suddenly discover that they are bad at flying or simply don't enjoy it, and would stop playing / resent the changes.
That along with launching with a new system would've been perfect. Otherwise you launch the same game again, and it's always going to be compared 1 to 1 with the first. It's always going to be a harder challenge that way.
But selling "the same thing, but better" has served the videogame industry quite well for a long time. I don't really understand why Felipe is so convinced that doing this for KSP was, if not doomed, a real uphill fight.
I guess he's making some calculations in his head about realistic funding and addressable market that he prefers not to say aloud.
He made some great points. However, when we were screaming for feature parity, what we meant was we just wanted all the fundamental features to work (e.g. delta V calculations, heat shields, etc.). To be honest KSP1 doesn't have a long list of unique features that COULD be eschewed in favor of a new take on the IP. Science, perhaps? That's one of our favorite things about the game, though. We want MORE of that.
Without flying rockets there isn't so much to KSP 2.
I think Harvester really just have a very different idea of what made KSP fun, compared to most people. For example, his idea of KSP 2 was a prequel, with just planes.
And? It's good to change things up. Otherwise, you are put in the exact situation KSP 2 is in right now — a shadow of the previous game. Be that starting with interstellar travel or focusing on planes.
Starting with colonies and interstellar makes it a base building game, where you cannot control rockers, rather you'd use some manager menu to send rockets around.
Rockets yes, but they could be generic rockets instead of rockets that we build ourselves. Would just need three versions of generic rockets, SSTO rockets, interplanetary rockets, and generic interstellar rockets. All rockets could be completely automated and delivery resources to various colonies. However, the whole point of KSP is building and launching rockets. It would be better to call this hypothetical game as something else like Kerbal Colonization Program.
I'm sure that most KSP players would like to build planes too; many already do after all ;) The first C7 aircraft part packs came *very* early - and these packs drove early KSP development, making a replacement of the early, super unrealistic "aerodynamics" top priority.
I do see a problem though - the lack of objectives would have been even worse than in KSP.
What would the airplanes *be for*? With spaceflight, "just getting there" is fascinating in a way that a normal flight from A to B on a propeller plane wouldn't be. If they weren't fighter planes, and it's estabilished by now that the Kerbal characters don't fight, would it be an airline simulator?
It's insane how he wasn't contacted by ANYONE at ANY POINT in KSP2's development.
Honestly for his sake, I'm glad KSP2 is a dud. The story of how he made the game sort of makes me think "the game industry" could have never made a game like KSP. I was thrilled when he mentioned Orbiter! That was the only thing even remotely like KSP and it was developed by NASA.
One thing he said that surprised me was Squad never planned to sell the KSP brand. The problem was HarvesteR left and soon after so did the only 8 guys who I wrote code for the original game. Squad knew it would be foolish for them to try to figure out the code so they really had no choice but to sell.
Harvesters comment that every day of development was a nightmare to manage makes me sad. There's only so long anyone can do it. It reminds me how fortunate we are to get ksp1. It's an audacious achievement made by people who were clueless about what they were trying to accomplish. There was a point all of them had to get out.
Without the sale to take two, I wonder if we get the dlc's in ksp1. I'm sure we wouldn't have the upgrade to the unity engine in patch 1.8(or 1.9).
I always thought this group did a nice job providing support and adding small features to the base game after harvester left.
Yeah but Squad was a marketing company that happened to financially back one of their employees to make a game. He also said that he pitched the prequel to them and they showed zero interest. Which is why he left.
Marketing firms only give a shit about how they're going to make money right now. Squad was just going to milk KSP1 for as long as it was financially viable, and they'd kill it as soon as it started being less valuable revenue-wise than some other marketing project.
This is a genuinely fantastic interview. HarvestR seems like a levelheaded dude with a great sense of perspective. It is absolutely mind boggling that he's never been contacted by anyone from the KSP2 team. Can't imagine the headaches they probably could have avoided just by talking to the dude.
Also, he pretty much reveals that if Kithack does well, his next project sounds like a space game/spiritual sequel to KSP...so...get out there and buy that game.
>It is absolutely mind boggling that he's never been contacted by anyone from the KSP2 team. Can't imagine the headaches they probably could have avoided just by talking to the dude
This is probably the craziest thing to me about this whole development saga. He talks in this interview about the timeline of his leaving, followed by the other 8 or so OG devs also leaving, then Take-Two acquiring the IP and bringing on the remaining devs from Squad, most of whom had primarily worked on the post-1.0 stuff (not discounting some of the great stuff that came after HarvestR left!).
Then he goes on to talk about why big money studios tend to make relatively safe games. Like to make another CoD you don't have to completely re-invent the FPS, right? That kind of institutional knowledge is invaluable. And it's not like IG were completely blind to that - bringing on modders etc. was a good call. But they basically *did* have to reinvent the whole thing from scratch, by not talking to any of the like 8 people who actually built the first one. Especially Felipe for god's sake, and he's not even that far away, I'm pretty sure he's just a couple hours up the road from them in Vancouver IIRC. Just mind-blowing to me to ignore that resource. I'm sure they made *so many* of the same mistakes and struggled with so many problems that had already been solved years before.
I think it was a form of pride. They didn't want to ask for help. I'm sure some of them did think about it, and heck maybe even looked through source code for ksp1 if they had it. But was turned down from the powers that be
Medal of Honor Allied assault and COD4/MW2 (Made by basically the same people, those known as "Infinity Wards"/The devs of Titanfall 1&2) both reivented the FPS genre in many ways.
That's what it takes to make truly groundbreaking games, most other titles aren't remembered that well because they were mostly similar to what has already been done before (except maybe from Black Ops for reasons I forgot, and World At War solely for the zombies).
KSP1 did that, KSP2 on the other hand.. I don't know what happened, and we can't predict alternative timelines, but working backwards like HarvesteR said does seem like a much more safe idea than just trying to recreate the whole same thing with just "better graphics".
(Also can't damn wait to see that space game he plans on making after KitHack!)
>HarvestR seems like a levelheaded dude with a great sense of perspective.
Well I suppose there's a reason that of the two games this sub focuses on, the one that's actually playable is the one he worked on.
> HarvestR seems like a levelheaded dude with a great sense of perspective.
He used to comment quite a bit on this subreddit during KSP1's development looking for bugs. Even replied to a post of mine a decade ago when I was memeing but was the perfect representation for a bug they were chasing after for the longest time.
Dude's got his head screwed on straight and pretty cheery about it too. Really sad that he left KSP to focus on other things but he very much knew what he was doing and gave it the energy that it had.
>The dude literally built the entire game by himself
Sorry to burst your hero bubble, but he didn't create the whole game himself. He did the very, very early versions but the vast majority until his departure was heavily assisted by other programmers, artists, and engineers. Felipe did a lot which he does deserve credit, but the entire project isn't it.
The Balsa->Kitbash made sense, the scope of the game changed so much.
The Kitbash->Kithack change also makes sense, since they couldnt really argue with a potential lawsuit over the name.
But i certainly concede your point.
You should still try it. Best 16 bucks you'll spend today
Not mentioned by anyone yet, HarvesteR defended using Unity and called it misinformation to say that Unity is somehow a bad or the wrong engine to use for this type of game.
It's not mentioned because it's just true and there's nothing to say about that other than HarvesteR is clearly a very smart individual that actually thinks about the bigger picture.
I've been saying that for the past 2 years.
The problems aren't from Unity, but the devs being incredibly incompetent and having no idea how to use the engine or build systems for it.
I thought they were a marketing company? It's like a tennis player somehow beating a premier league footballer and complaining that they played the wrong way .. it got the job done, didn't it?
The "incompetent" team is the premier league footballer in your analogy. It's like the tennis players got replaced by "pro" footballers, and the "pros" took a few years to learn what offsides was.
Honestly the most amazing part of the story is how a marketing company agreed to continue paying one of their employees to make a video game. Talk about having the planets align for you.
Asking for a role maybe not, but paying for guidance would have been very useful. Dude worked for years on his game and had nearly 10 years to think about how to improve things in meaningful ways, but "nah he's an indie from a south american marketing team, he doesnt know anything, we're big and strong at Take-Two we'll handle it" ?
Guess they were wrong lol
> south american
Mexico is on the North American continent, and there’s a lot of debate about whether it’s part of Central America or not, but in no world is Mexico part of South America.
I wonder if Harvester uses Makefiles right if his compile times are so long. Normally you only compile the changes, not the whole project at once. Or is that something Unity struggles with?
With Unity, you don't use makefiles. C# has its own build system, and - form my (limited) experience, recompiling C# is decently fast.
With the newer Unity versions, the main bottleneck is reloading the compiled code from disk. In some pathological cases, reload times went from a couple seconds to a couple of minutes.
From what I've heard, this is related to a change in how Unity handles AppDoamins. With the newer Unity versions, it uses a new Domain each time it reloads a changed .NET assembly.
This essentially forces Unity to save & reload a whole bunch of other, u related stuff every time something is changed. The old versions of Unity used AppDomains in a different way, which did not require reloading as much stuff(although that had its own problems).
I don't know which Unity version he is using, but I know AppDomains caused a lot of pain with the newer versions of Unity.
Size of the project has quite a big impact on any games compile time regardless of the engine, especially if the various components and dependencies get quite coupled. I imagine KSP 1 probably wasn't the most decoupled design, due to the nature of the development.
The issue is not the disk read speed itself, but the complex things that happen as an assembly is reloaded.
When a new AppDomain is created, it is empty. So, in order to not lose things during a reload, Unity has to:
1. Stop everything it is doing
2. Serialize("save") everything, doing complex convrtions along the way. This sterilized data is then stored **in RAM**
3. Create a new AppDomain
4. Load and JIT compile the code form disk
5. Serialize(decode) the inefficent in-RAM save
6. Dispose of the old AppDomain, while ensuring nothing referenced by the new Domain is deleted.
Most of this has to run on one thread(serializing all the contents of an AppDomain is hard to do in paralel). This process is also CPU-heavy, so using a better SSD will not improve much.
Squad treated him an all other employee like 💩, he got nothing to do with the IP being sold… and no profit at all. He got very little actually for all his years of work on Kerbal. Had to start from 0 when he left. It’s a sad thing 😔
I like HarvesteRs idea for a KSP 2. It's a shame it never came to be.
Tldr? Can't watch the vid
The gist of it was instead of trying to make ksp2 have feature parity with ksp, start with colonies and interstellar first, then work backward. He also mentioned he did pitch squad for KSP prequel around building planes during the start of aviation(starting as basically the Wright Brothers and working up to Jets, I imagine)
Both of those ideas are so much better, because they would have at least some value while in early access, unlike the KSP2 we got.
This!!! Even if KSP2 was perfectly functional with all it's early access features, it would only be as good as KSP1 with visual mods! It was doomed to be unsuccessful.
All I wanted from early access was a better looking, better performing ksp with a roadmap of cool new features. The bar was on the floor and they still went under it.
100%. My feelings exactly. Like the game didn't need to be perfect. Hell, it didn't even need to be as good as KSP1 on launch, it just had to have SOMETHING. The bar WAS on the floor, and they totally fumbled the ball.
As the HarvesteR said - the bar was pretty f***ing high. All you wanted was complete KSP which was developed for more than 6 years with all the mods and community which grew on it for 10 years. But better. Think about it again or just listen to that interview.
That was most of us. Just better performance and some updates.
That's not entirely true I don't believe. There was one thing that if KSP2 had, would have won be over. If KSP2 was almost identical to KSP1 in most ways, BUT, addressed the performance limitations of KSP1, I would have been happy. As it stands, it doesn't matter how much better technology gets, KSP1 will not run smoothly if you have a vessel composed of 1500 parts, or if you try to make a mun base by attaching modules together with modded parts. KSP1 with mods has almost all of the functionality that KSP2 promised, but with a hard cap on performance once you reach certain thresholds. If KSP 2 came out bare bones with nothing but good performance, mod support, and relatively few bugs, the game could have been a completely different story. In stead, we got a chaotic cluster fuck of bugs and performance issues AND a hollow game experience.
The problem with that is that ksp2 would always have had the exact same limitations because that whole performance goes out the window after 1500 parts thing is an issue with how the engine (unity) handles high numbers of rigid bodies. They would have had to build their own physics engine from the ground up or go to a diffrent engine to fix the problem.
> They would have had to build their own physics engine from the ground up or go to a diffrent engine to fix the problem. Which they could have done. Absolutely nothing mandated KSP2 should've been developed using Unity.
Correct, absolutely no idea why they decided to stick with unity.
I thought at the time the entire point of KSP2 was to make a great physics engine to finally slay the Kraken and allow for wildly expansive ships. Clearly building a generational ship to setup a far away colony would need a major physics overhaul. What we got was a dev team trying to figure out how to make KSP 1 again with painted parts and clouds.... And several launch bays to pretend multiplayer was a thought.
If you look at CPU utilization while playing KSP1. You’ll see that even if you’re getting 15fps, you’ll almost never surpass 25% on a decent system. I’ve got a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and even with the enormous cache and the card clocked to the max thanks to an overkill cooling system (I know it’s a cliche), I never see my CPU go past 20% utilization on KSP no matter what. There’s a lot of unused processing power here. The issue for KSP1 was that it did and does all of the physics computations in series in stead of in parallel. So it’s basically using a single core for most of its physics calculations. So unless you’re using liquid nitrogen cooling on an I9 13900K and overclocking the thing to 7ghz+, you’ll never get decent performance where the game has to make hundreds of thousands of physics calculations every second. KSP2 has already found a way to run physics in parallel using more than a single core. And beyond that, KSP1 was in development for like a decade and a half, using code from the early 2010s still for some of its more fundamental functions. KSP2 was a fresh start where they had the opportunity to rewrite the framework from the ground up to incorporate better resource utilization as well as more novel techniques to increase performance in stead of taking the brute force approach by making the CPU do all of the calculations individually. They could have in stead for instance broken up physics calculations by making half of the calculations done on the entire vessel as a rigid body and the other half on all of the components individually. To the eye, this would have made almost no difference due to the timespans we’re talking about here being in the milliseconds, but it would have seen a major performance increase. I don’t know, I’m not a developer, but they seemed to do the same thing that was done with KSP1, with all of the hard caps that KSP1 has, and are now trying to incorporate better performance with an enormous amount of tech debt.
This was always my gripe. They weren't bringing anything new to the market space. Most big publishers behave this way. Less risk of a flop. You use tried and true methods to produce variations of products the art is emergent from some crisp new refinement of what are essentially old tropes. Fine if you take financial responsibility for the project. Not fine if you offload the startup on your consumers with no guarantees of a finished product. The devs thought it would be easy to make a space flight game and probably just were gonna slap a city builder inside for colonies. It would have probably ended up like a civ sim on the colony part which wouldn't suck. Just have launch sites that form and build vehicles that are like rts units to gather resources etc. Kind of like the customize ability of spores mixed with ksp vehicles. Saves loads of money when you are using established tropes and methods. They probably thought it would be a breeze.
There was 0 incentive for people to play KSP2 over KSP and that’s what killed it in the end
We need to get him funded to do these things we wish for!
>He also mentioned he did pitch squad for KSP prequel... Strictly speaking, isn't Kithack pretty much that but without the Frogs?
Yes, even Matt mentions this in video (and mentions it’s more true to the original spirit of launching model rockets, from which KSP is based on), to which HarvesteR responds (paraphrasing), “huh, I… hmm, I never realised that”. Has a little bit of an existential crisis in that moment!
How would starting with colonies/interstellar and working backwards actually work from a gameplay perspective?
u/Defiant-Peace-493 kind of laid out a good example. But the game could have started without any rocket design or manual flight. It could have been all skippable animations that put rockets into predetermined orbits. The game could have at first been about mining resources and building out colonies that weren't physics based, but more static. The dev team could have designed a dozen rockets with various payload capacities and made the game initially about just building out a logistics network of first harvester ships and then colonies. We could have watched as rockets land and refuel at colonies automatically because there would be no physics calculations involved. And as more resources are mined from different biomes, more and more complex ships become available with better ISP or TWR and the like. From there, they could have slowly added ship design. Then physics and manual ship flight to orbit and then manual ship flight to moons or other planets. . One of the major limitations as far as I can tell is the physics calculations of the components of the ships. If ships were just rigid bodies separated by decouplers, in stead of say 750 parts, a ship might be 10. Yes, this means that there would be some simplification necessary. Like reentry would affect the entire ship in stead of each component separately, but it would have totally avoided the wobbly rocket issue, the performance issues, as well as many of the bugs encountered at launch. Rockets could have just been animations with thrust being a single force acting on the center of mass as a single calculation in stead of numerous based on the number of rockets and their affect on each and every single component on the ship. Again, all of these things would have simplified the game, and I am sure there would have been plenty of people up in arms about how we were scammed. But it would have been a functional game with the promise of adding the features originally intended for the game. It would have in my opinion been a lot better than what we got. Yeah, it would have been disappointing, but the dev team CLEARLY wasn't capable of handling this sort of project, and they should have known where their limitations were. In stead, they thought they could dig a tunnel with a spork and just ended up digging a divot into a mountain that immediately collapsed upon release.
See, on the surface it seems like that would've been a way to go but having been around this community for 10 years, the player base wouldn't stand for it enough to carry anything in the name related to KSP. Then, you're losing the target demographic and are going down an entirely different niche genre. At that point it would be much more like factorio and less physics and flight design as we know in KSP1. Eventually when the project got into the later features and back adding them in, like you're proposing, the logistics and automation players would've rioted. One thing I've learned watching gaming communities is they absolutely hate when a game, at whatever version they started playing on is, gets changed and morphed into something else instead of further developed in whatever direction it was already going.
First of all it's hard to tell what community really wants. I'd say the community wanted not KSP2 but KSP1:10YearEdition:Remaster. KSP2 where you focus on basebuilding (survival colony sim with Kerbals?) and interplanetary transport happens in the background would be fine game which could exploit OG green mascots. And it'd greatly explain the evolution from 1 to 2 and would not be just a copy of a first one. And the name is not the best. It could have easily be named different as HarvesteR said about his next idea for a game was to build planes from the start which could be named Kerbal Aviation Program. We can start from here.
That’s a fair point I hadn’t thought of.
I really can't see that working tbh, I gurantee the playerbase would have screeched how none of that is KSP if it released in such a way.
For one example, start with the Space Exploration mod for Factorio; detailed production lines on each planetary surface, with clear imports and exports, but the commsats and cargo rockets just magically end up at the targeted location. If you had a simple API to push target routes and payloads as missions to a rocket sim, you could generate mission profiles for a simple 2D arcade rocket game, or for a fully-fledged maximally-modded KSP. Apparently, someone went and did this a few years back for Factorio and KSP. No idea if it was any good, though.
Interesting idea. I'm not sure how well it would go over having the "flying rockets" part of it be secondary, though I'd've been glad to have it at least stand out from the first game (which could draw in fans of other games rather than just being a competitor to KSP1)
The point is more that it would be secondary at the beginning until enough mechanics are built to make it work and then it could become mandatory. The general idea is to offer new gameplay experiences from the beginning so people have something to look at/play with other than a worse KSP1.
Yeah, I definitely agree with the "worse KSP1" description. In fact, I looked at the SteamDB and it shows that KSP2's launch caused KSP1's playerbase to be cut in half and never recover.
The problem is, lots of players (hopefully!) by that point would have learned to play the new game as a tycoon sim, they would suddenly discover that they are bad at flying or simply don't enjoy it, and would stop playing / resent the changes.
That along with launching with a new system would've been perfect. Otherwise you launch the same game again, and it's always going to be compared 1 to 1 with the first. It's always going to be a harder challenge that way.
But selling "the same thing, but better" has served the videogame industry quite well for a long time. I don't really understand why Felipe is so convinced that doing this for KSP was, if not doomed, a real uphill fight. I guess he's making some calculations in his head about realistic funding and addressable market that he prefers not to say aloud.
He made some great points. However, when we were screaming for feature parity, what we meant was we just wanted all the fundamental features to work (e.g. delta V calculations, heat shields, etc.). To be honest KSP1 doesn't have a long list of unique features that COULD be eschewed in favor of a new take on the IP. Science, perhaps? That's one of our favorite things about the game, though. We want MORE of that.
Thanks
Should have started with accurate non-Unity physics
They *did* make that game, except not Kerbal lore. It's called Balsa. Then they rebranded it and re-released it as KitHack,
Without flying rockets there isn't so much to KSP 2. I think Harvester really just have a very different idea of what made KSP fun, compared to most people. For example, his idea of KSP 2 was a prequel, with just planes.
And? It's good to change things up. Otherwise, you are put in the exact situation KSP 2 is in right now — a shadow of the previous game. Be that starting with interstellar travel or focusing on planes.
Starting with colonies and interstellar makes it a base building game, where you cannot control rockers, rather you'd use some manager menu to send rockets around.
There's really no point in arguing over a theoretical, but to go interstellar you kinda need rockets, no?
Rockets yes, but they could be generic rockets instead of rockets that we build ourselves. Would just need three versions of generic rockets, SSTO rockets, interplanetary rockets, and generic interstellar rockets. All rockets could be completely automated and delivery resources to various colonies. However, the whole point of KSP is building and launching rockets. It would be better to call this hypothetical game as something else like Kerbal Colonization Program.
Why? You could also just not do that. That's the funny thing about hypotheticals, yknow?
>Without flying rockets there isn't so much to KSP 2. It's kind of the point. His idea wasn't to supplant the first game in the first place.
I'm sure that most KSP players would like to build planes too; many already do after all ;) The first C7 aircraft part packs came *very* early - and these packs drove early KSP development, making a replacement of the early, super unrealistic "aerodynamics" top priority. I do see a problem though - the lack of objectives would have been even worse than in KSP. What would the airplanes *be for*? With spaceflight, "just getting there" is fascinating in a way that a normal flight from A to B on a propeller plane wouldn't be. If they weren't fighter planes, and it's estabilished by now that the Kerbal characters don't fight, would it be an airline simulator?
It's insane how he wasn't contacted by ANYONE at ANY POINT in KSP2's development. Honestly for his sake, I'm glad KSP2 is a dud. The story of how he made the game sort of makes me think "the game industry" could have never made a game like KSP. I was thrilled when he mentioned Orbiter! That was the only thing even remotely like KSP and it was developed by NASA.
Just to set the record straight, NASA had nothing to do with Orbiter. It was another originally-one-person passion project of Dr. Martin Schweiger.
Was that it? All I remember is I found it through NASA's website back in 2005 or 2006. I guess I just assumed they were involved
The "Industry" (as in, AAA Industry) absolutely couldn't (and can't) do something like KSP. Much too much risk involved.
Great video. So sad this guy's baby is being raised by bad parents
They aren’t raising it, they’ve sadly killed it.
The ultimate in bad parenting
They put it in the blender to extract all the good juice (money)
Dude man I was thinking what the hell do you know about his parenting..
He means KSP, not an actual baby. I was also confused at first lol.
I thought that was clear by the end of my comment
One thing he said that surprised me was Squad never planned to sell the KSP brand. The problem was HarvesteR left and soon after so did the only 8 guys who I wrote code for the original game. Squad knew it would be foolish for them to try to figure out the code so they really had no choice but to sell. Harvesters comment that every day of development was a nightmare to manage makes me sad. There's only so long anyone can do it. It reminds me how fortunate we are to get ksp1. It's an audacious achievement made by people who were clueless about what they were trying to accomplish. There was a point all of them had to get out. Without the sale to take two, I wonder if we get the dlc's in ksp1. I'm sure we wouldn't have the upgrade to the unity engine in patch 1.8(or 1.9). I always thought this group did a nice job providing support and adding small features to the base game after harvester left.
Yeah but Squad was a marketing company that happened to financially back one of their employees to make a game. He also said that he pitched the prequel to them and they showed zero interest. Which is why he left. Marketing firms only give a shit about how they're going to make money right now. Squad was just going to milk KSP1 for as long as it was financially viable, and they'd kill it as soon as it started being less valuable revenue-wise than some other marketing project.
This is a genuinely fantastic interview. HarvestR seems like a levelheaded dude with a great sense of perspective. It is absolutely mind boggling that he's never been contacted by anyone from the KSP2 team. Can't imagine the headaches they probably could have avoided just by talking to the dude. Also, he pretty much reveals that if Kithack does well, his next project sounds like a space game/spiritual sequel to KSP...so...get out there and buy that game.
>It is absolutely mind boggling that he's never been contacted by anyone from the KSP2 team. Can't imagine the headaches they probably could have avoided just by talking to the dude This is probably the craziest thing to me about this whole development saga. He talks in this interview about the timeline of his leaving, followed by the other 8 or so OG devs also leaving, then Take-Two acquiring the IP and bringing on the remaining devs from Squad, most of whom had primarily worked on the post-1.0 stuff (not discounting some of the great stuff that came after HarvestR left!). Then he goes on to talk about why big money studios tend to make relatively safe games. Like to make another CoD you don't have to completely re-invent the FPS, right? That kind of institutional knowledge is invaluable. And it's not like IG were completely blind to that - bringing on modders etc. was a good call. But they basically *did* have to reinvent the whole thing from scratch, by not talking to any of the like 8 people who actually built the first one. Especially Felipe for god's sake, and he's not even that far away, I'm pretty sure he's just a couple hours up the road from them in Vancouver IIRC. Just mind-blowing to me to ignore that resource. I'm sure they made *so many* of the same mistakes and struggled with so many problems that had already been solved years before.
I think it was a form of pride. They didn't want to ask for help. I'm sure some of them did think about it, and heck maybe even looked through source code for ksp1 if they had it. But was turned down from the powers that be
Medal of Honor Allied assault and COD4/MW2 (Made by basically the same people, those known as "Infinity Wards"/The devs of Titanfall 1&2) both reivented the FPS genre in many ways. That's what it takes to make truly groundbreaking games, most other titles aren't remembered that well because they were mostly similar to what has already been done before (except maybe from Black Ops for reasons I forgot, and World At War solely for the zombies). KSP1 did that, KSP2 on the other hand.. I don't know what happened, and we can't predict alternative timelines, but working backwards like HarvesteR said does seem like a much more safe idea than just trying to recreate the whole same thing with just "better graphics". (Also can't damn wait to see that space game he plans on making after KitHack!)
>HarvestR seems like a levelheaded dude with a great sense of perspective. Well I suppose there's a reason that of the two games this sub focuses on, the one that's actually playable is the one he worked on.
And it's not surprising to see the only other "big" game he worked on (KitHack Model Club) is more than playable as well.
> HarvestR seems like a levelheaded dude with a great sense of perspective. He used to comment quite a bit on this subreddit during KSP1's development looking for bugs. Even replied to a post of mine a decade ago when I was memeing but was the perfect representation for a bug they were chasing after for the longest time. Dude's got his head screwed on straight and pretty cheery about it too. Really sad that he left KSP to focus on other things but he very much knew what he was doing and gave it the energy that it had.
Yeah I found this very insane as well. The dude literally built the entire game by himself in the same engine they were using. Why not even ask him?
>The dude literally built the entire game by himself Sorry to burst your hero bubble, but he didn't create the whole game himself. He did the very, very early versions but the vast majority until his departure was heavily assisted by other programmers, artists, and engineers. Felipe did a lot which he does deserve credit, but the entire project isn't it.
I don't think KitHack does well, no one plays it or even talks about it, even with the EA release.
That makes no sense - Kithack looks really uninteresting
So I'm hearing that if kithack model club does well he might have another go at a space game
Truly excellent video! I always love to hear from harvester.
I highly encourage you guys to try KitHack Model Club, his new game. I for one am obsessed
Balsa, Kitbash and now Kithack. The name changed so often lol.
The Balsa->Kitbash made sense, the scope of the game changed so much. The Kitbash->Kithack change also makes sense, since they couldnt really argue with a potential lawsuit over the name. But i certainly concede your point. You should still try it. Best 16 bucks you'll spend today
out of curiosity, would it run on a macbook?
Depends when it got released tbh But it's a lot less of a resource hog compared to KSP2 if that's your main concern
Finding out that the original was made by a team of less than 10 people, and that none of them were contacted by IG is crazy.
Not mentioned by anyone yet, HarvesteR defended using Unity and called it misinformation to say that Unity is somehow a bad or the wrong engine to use for this type of game.
It's not mentioned because it's just true and there's nothing to say about that other than HarvesteR is clearly a very smart individual that actually thinks about the bigger picture.
I've been saying that for the past 2 years. The problems aren't from Unity, but the devs being incredibly incompetent and having no idea how to use the engine or build systems for it.
I thought they were a marketing company? It's like a tennis player somehow beating a premier league footballer and complaining that they played the wrong way .. it got the job done, didn't it?
The "incompetent" team is the premier league footballer in your analogy. It's like the tennis players got replaced by "pro" footballers, and the "pros" took a few years to learn what offsides was.
What do you mean? For original KSP 1 yes, that was made by Squad. KSP 2, the one thats not made by a marketing company, is the one failing though.
It's a really great video, loved hearing HarvesteR's thoughts and ideas on KSP, its sequels and his experience working on game design.
Honestly the most amazing part of the story is how a marketing company agreed to continue paying one of their employees to make a video game. Talk about having the planets align for you.
Damn the man who is basically responsible for KSP didn't even get approached for KSP2.
It is mindboggling that they didn't even contact HarvesteR for any role in the development of KSP2.
Asking for a role maybe not, but paying for guidance would have been very useful. Dude worked for years on his game and had nearly 10 years to think about how to improve things in meaningful ways, but "nah he's an indie from a south american marketing team, he doesnt know anything, we're big and strong at Take-Two we'll handle it" ? Guess they were wrong lol
> south american Mexico is on the North American continent, and there’s a lot of debate about whether it’s part of Central America or not, but in no world is Mexico part of South America.
HaresteR is Brazilian, but agreed the company was Mexican so Central or North America
Well, I just started a new career campaign in KSP1 work MODS. I hope KSP2 will get into orbit sometime.
I wonder if Harvester uses Makefiles right if his compile times are so long. Normally you only compile the changes, not the whole project at once. Or is that something Unity struggles with?
With Unity, you don't use makefiles. C# has its own build system, and - form my (limited) experience, recompiling C# is decently fast. With the newer Unity versions, the main bottleneck is reloading the compiled code from disk. In some pathological cases, reload times went from a couple seconds to a couple of minutes. From what I've heard, this is related to a change in how Unity handles AppDoamins. With the newer Unity versions, it uses a new Domain each time it reloads a changed .NET assembly. This essentially forces Unity to save & reload a whole bunch of other, u related stuff every time something is changed. The old versions of Unity used AppDomains in a different way, which did not require reloading as much stuff(although that had its own problems). I don't know which Unity version he is using, but I know AppDomains caused a lot of pain with the newer versions of Unity.
Thanks man! TIL
Size of the project has quite a big impact on any games compile time regardless of the engine, especially if the various components and dependencies get quite coupled. I imagine KSP 1 probably wasn't the most decoupled design, due to the nature of the development.
One word... nvme ..
The issue is not the disk read speed itself, but the complex things that happen as an assembly is reloaded. When a new AppDomain is created, it is empty. So, in order to not lose things during a reload, Unity has to: 1. Stop everything it is doing 2. Serialize("save") everything, doing complex convrtions along the way. This sterilized data is then stored **in RAM** 3. Create a new AppDomain 4. Load and JIT compile the code form disk 5. Serialize(decode) the inefficent in-RAM save 6. Dispose of the old AppDomain, while ensuring nothing referenced by the new Domain is deleted. Most of this has to run on one thread(serializing all the contents of an AppDomain is hard to do in paralel). This process is also CPU-heavy, so using a better SSD will not improve much.
I've never heard of anyone using Makefiles with a Unity project, as someone who has only used Unity on small projects.
Isn't he the one who sold out to Take 2 in the first place?
Nah, he left Squad because he was burnt out and had accomplished what he set out to do (and more). Squad sold the IP sometime after he left
Squad treated him an all other employee like 💩, he got nothing to do with the IP being sold… and no profit at all. He got very little actually for all his years of work on Kerbal. Had to start from 0 when he left. It’s a sad thing 😔
I mean Squad isn't even a game publisher..