
Kerbal Space Program 2 - xucheng
https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/game/kerbal-space-program-2/
======
TeMPOraL
Little context for the trailer: it seems to be a homage to this fan video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkDOOsGg-9I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkDOOsGg-9I),
which is one of the most well-known videos in the KSP community, and something
people show to people to get them into playing this game. I must say the new,
"official", video does capture the atmosphere very well.

If the game will look a third as well as on the trailer visualization, I'll
buy it without thinking (who am I lying to, I'll buy it anyway). One thing
though: I hope the modding capability and freedom won't be diminished.

If KSP is a great game by itself, mods make it a literal order of magnitude
better - a huge amount of solid fan work was done to expand every imaginable
aspect of KSP. And I mean it: among many things, mods give you many more
realistic and unrealistic building blocks, life support management,
communication networks including speed of light delay, trajectory planning,
UI/UX improvements, graphics improvements, orbital assembly, working space
telescopes, realistic aerodynamics model (including supersonic physics),
n-body simulation and non-symmetric gravity fields,... I don't think there's
another game where so much of such highly skilled effort was spent for free to
make it deeper.

I really hope they won't do anything that would make this depth of modding
impossible.

~~~
Diederich
> ...n-body simulation and non-symmetric gravity fields...

I want to agree with everything said here, and add that the KSP mod ecosystem
is no joke. The few things mentioned here barely scratch the surface.

As a point of comparison: I'm aware of and long involved with the Minecraft
community, and it is huge and excellent. While the total amount of mod
material is likely greater for Minecraft compared to KSP, I'm comfortable
saying that the mods in KSP are deeper and wider in scope.

~~~
jacobush
Someone should marry the two

~~~
l0b0
Please don't, some of us have families to feed!

On a more serious note, I wonder how hard it would be to introduce even semi-
realistic Newtonian physics to a voxel-based game world.

~~~
jacobush
I was thinking use KSP to "drive" objects in Minecraft... not that I'd do it,
but I could imagine some twisted soul. :-)

------
t0astbread
KSP always looked very cool but I've heard a couple of things that threw me
off:

\- KSP devs are or were treated poorly by their employer (low pay, no
compensation for the success of the game)

\- apparently the program collected a lot of data (I can't remember what
exactly) about its users and the machines it was running on, to the point
where even non-privacy minded people were calling it spyware

Does anyone know anything about this? Afaik discussion about these issues just
kinda stopped after a while but we never got a conclusive answer to these
points.

~~~
t0astbread
Aside from those controversies, does anyone else find it kinda weird that KSP
is not FOSS? I mean, I don't wanna sound like the guy that points an index
finger at devs making proprietary software but I would've guessed they have
the right kind of audience for that. (In the sense that their audience would
still pay for the program and they might actually benefit from open sourcing
it.)

~~~
liability
Not so weird when you consider that there are very few open source games with
open source assets.

An open source engine, similar to OpenTTD, OpenRCT2, OpenMW, etc sure would be
nice though.

~~~
t0astbread
Yeah (unfortunately) but there are lots of open source space simulation
programs:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20518109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20518109)

------
Teknoman117
I wonder what the modding support is going to actually be like.

I'm the one of the two original coauthors of the Kopernicus mod (although I
handed off development of it to Dorian years ago when I got my first job after
graduation because I was having trouble finding time while settling into
working life). Writing that mod was already difficult as hell, because while
the game supported mods, there was no SDK or any supporting documentation.
There was essentially a gentleman's agreement between the KSP modding scene
and the developers that ripping apart the game assemblies for the purposes of
making mods wasn't didn't violate the terms of service, even though it
explicitly forbid such activities.

Building Kopernicus by spending days in the Mono .NET Assembly Decompiler
figuring out how to override pieces of the game to make the custom solar
systems was pretty darn fun though. I can't tell you how much time I spent
trying to figure out how to programmatically make something that
PSystem.systemPrefab would accept as a Unity Prefab object. Or the fun of
learning about attributes in .NET to build a reflection based configuration
system that would actually process KSP's configuration file format into said
systemPrefab object.

One of the things that the modding community felt at the time was that as
Take-Two starting getting more aggressive about hiding the way the internals
of the game worked (it's very murky if said gentleman's agreement is still in
place), and in it's place producing some documentation, that the way forward
may be just making an open source KSP-style game with original content and a
completely different engine as to avoid any legal problems (we'd all seen how
the internals of KSP worked, so we needed to make sure to do ours entirely
differently). But no one (including myself) really ever found the time to work
on it or made a serious effort to do so...

If they solved the performance issues with large ships, and have somewhat more
realistic physics (e.g. Lagrange points/Parking orbits are impossible in KSP),
that may just be cause to drop the idea completely. I've mainly found my time
spent exploring the depths of orbital integrators, Eric Bruneton's atmosphere
paper, and Vulkan.

------
albertzeyer
Last time I read about KSP
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16581913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16581913)),
there was lots of criticism about the developers, or their working conditions.
It sounded so bad that this was one of the reasons for me to not buy it. Has
this improved?

~~~
enragedcacti
It was purchased by Take-Two so the developers are probably only treated as
badly as normal game devs now.

[https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/161355...](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/161355-ksp-
acquired-by-take-two-interactive/)

------
AcerbicZero
I was a huge fan of KSP, bought into it back in like ~.8/.9 days before there
was anything to actually do, and I loved it. Talked tons of people into
playing it and I got a lot of joy out of it. I didn't like the way Squad did
things, and the bigger they got the worse things seemed to get, but they still
ended up producing a solid, relatively stable game, which made space "fun" in
a way not many games could.

Squad threw away the majority of the good will they originally generated
(mostly by treating their community, and especially their modders, like crap)
but the core concept of KSP is solid enough that even with their questionable
behavior it still managed to thrive. I wont be backing this early on, but
perhaps when it gets closer to release it'll be easier to judge what kind of
product they're going to end up with.

~~~
philipov
It looks like Squad threw away more than just good will, because they're not
developing this. Some studio named Star Theory Games is listed as the
developer for this on Steam. Does anyone have any more color on them?

~~~
tomatotomato37
The only concrete thing I could find on their website claims they were a big
part of "Monday Night Combat", though the wikipedia for that credits it to
Uber Entertainment. Their facebook is equally empty, with the only non-KSP
post being that of a mildly nervous chihuahua. It seems they are a spinoff of
Uber Entertainment best as I can tell.

As for the quality of Uber Entertainment, their later works tended to be
unsuccessful, though they seemed to have some luck with VR.

~~~
perseusmandate
For what it's worth Monday Night Combat was an excellent game

------
SketchySeaBeast
I've sunk a ton of hours in the original Kerbal Space Program, its pre-launch
state is one of my favourite games ever.

The only thing there that excites me here is interstellar travel. I'm worried
about this being a soul-less cashing in, with a "less, but pretty" situation -
much like every versions of the Sims.

~~~
TylerE
I just hope it's actually a _new_ game, and not further layers of goop on the
janky Unity core.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I think we'd all miss watching our monoliths swaying under the acceleration
like explosive orange palm trees.

------
gnulinux
Ah, what a coincidence I just bought KSP about a month ago. Very good game but
lacks a lot of automation. kOS and MechJeb solves some of these issues, but if
you want to play "non-cheaty" it's still a very manual game; there is no way
to make use of computers whereas in real space programs everything is computed
and organized so precisely.

~~~
nkrisc
I always thought MechJeb and such should have already been part of the base
game. Learning how to do manoeuvers manually is an important and rewarding
part of the game. But after flying your 1000th craft into orbit, I just want
to automate and manually fly the stuff I haven't tried yet.

~~~
godelski
I think in career mode automation should be something you unlock. Not sure why
it doesn't exist. Seems like a natural thing to be in the tech tree. Even as
varying levels.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Modding community thinks so too. Like with many other mods, MechJeb can be
restricted to operate only when appropriate parts are included on your vessel,
and those parts are unlockable in the tech tree.

There's a mod called Community Tech Tree, which exists solely as a way to
incorporate other mods into a somewhat coherent, extended tech tree.

------
frittig
What I liked about the current KSP is that everything is real. NASA actually
sent a satellite to all of our Soler system's planets. They actually developed
a rover that can drive on the moon, and they preformed rendezvous with two
spaceships. They also had to deal with a finite amount of fuel and parts that
could be destroyed if there was too much pressure or heat on them.

Now with colonies and mining it is less realistic and more sci-fi. I can see
the appeal of that, but it is a different appeal. I would have preferred that
they spent energy developing things to make it more realistic. For example,
Lagrange points, different forms of propellents, n body physics, automation,
ets. Recently with Bereshit I learned that before (certain?) rockets can fire
their main engines they have to fire small ones to provide acceleration in
order to move the fuel in the big tank closer to the main engine. It would
have been nice if KSP also took that into account.

On an unrelated topic, I wonder how KSP 2 will make multiplayer work with
timewarp

~~~
TeMPOraL
It doesn't seem to me that the new things stray much from the "real but not
necessarily actually done in the humanity's past" path. Colonies and mining is
what you did (or at least many people did) after nailing their first couple
landings and dockings. It's what real people in real space exploration
business want to do, it's what they're preparing to do.

The video seemed very realistic to me, in the hard sci-fi, "this is how it
might look like under constraints of known physics and technology" way. The
most outlandish things they've shown on KSP2 video are Orion and Daedalus
rockets, rings for centrifugal gravity, and domed greenhouses, _all_ of which
are things taken out of real plans done decades ago, and have no reason for
not working in reality except that we run out of funding for Space Race 40
years ago. There's also precedent with original KSP, which had its version of
NERVA nuclear-thermal rocket engine, which never flown in space either.

------
daniel_rh
I can't find any information on linux support with KSP2. Does anyone have a
link with more linux information? One of the many reasons I loved KSP was
robust linux support.

~~~
sikhnerd
Looks like no :(

[https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315...](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315-kerbal-
space-program-2-master-post/page/2/&tab=comments#comment-3653099)

~~~
kelnos
Eh, that post is left deliberately ambiguous. I wouldn't be surprised to see a
Linux port eventually. And if not, there's always wine...

~~~
TeMPOraL
Or modders saying "we'll keep backporting your work on KSP2 to KSP1, only
better, until you change your mind".

------
eropple
I was pretty bummed to hear about Squad doing their people dirty; the company
seemed to consistently underpay and burn out their developers. Have they
improved? (With cites?)

~~~
philipov
Squad is not developing this game.

------
sarcasmatwork
Looks fun, anyone play previous versions?

The trailer was hilarious without sound. Watching guy fall out landing module,
or they wreck their entire space ship.

~~~
BitwiseFool
Highly recommend picking up a copy. It's the most rewarding game I have ever
played.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Absolutely. Just landing on the mun is one of those moment you never forget.
And then the rescue mission to get the first lander from the mun. And then the
rescue mission for the rescue mission.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And then you pronounce the resulting pile of wreckage the first Mun colony,
and set sights on Minmus, which is somewhat more forgiving.

~~~
DuskStar
And then, eventually, you'll have done everything in the game... And then
you'll install RSS+RP-0 [0] and struggle to get back into orbit again. The
mods add a ton of depth beyond what the base game can provide.

For those curious, RSS stands for Real Solar System - replacing the Kerbol
system with ours. This is a large difficulty ramp, since things in our solar
system are far larger than those in Kerbol, so even with the same surface
gravities delta v requirements end up much higher. (For instance, ~2.7km/s is
enough to hit orbit on Kerbin if flown properly, while 9.5km/s is more common
on Earth) To partially compensate for this you have RP-0, a modpack that
(among other things) replaces all the engines, fuels, tanks and other parts
with their real life counterparts, making the higher delta v requirements
actually achievable. (And also adding a ton of complications, such as life
support, communications delay, cryogenic fuel boil off, limited restarts, fuel
ullage, and more!)

0: [https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0](https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0)

------
gzu
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.

~~~
inopinatus
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.

~~~
phire
"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.

------
cydonian_monk
I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. Maybe when there's a real game and
more details, or some actual meat regarding what they mean when they say
"deeper mod support", and an absolute answer on Mac/Linux support.... But even
then I'm not sure.

What worries me more is how this announcement seemingly came out of nowhere,
all while the actual KSP is still receiving updates. Even little quality of
life updates like new textures for most (or all?) of the planets in the next
update. Something just seems off.

And let's be honest - half the charm of KSP is its lack of polish, and the
janky little things at the corners that just don't quite work right and
probably never will.

Maybe this is successful and introduces a new (half)generation of simulation
gamers to space/physics sims. Or maybe it blows up and we never hear about it
again. Who knows. I'm just not "hyped" at all.

------
everyone
"Not actual gameplay" So this flashy expensive trailer is utterly pointless.

This is a game sequel that I am worried about. The original is a fantastic
game. The sequel is being made by different people. Maybe they dont have as
good an understanding of the medium of games. This trailer is a bit of a red
flag in that regard already.

------
loudmax
The Original Kerbal Space Program is playable on Mac and Linux. If its sequel
is a worthy successor, I hope it will follow suit.

~~~
mitchty
Looking like a no so far:
[https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315...](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/187315-kerbal-
space-program-2-master-post/&do=findComment&comment=3653099)

~~~
meemo
Will it be available for Mac?

I've read that it'll be available for "PC, PS4, and Xbox One."

~~~
ryandrake
Such disappointing backward progress. They obviously have developers who know
how to write cross platform, since they are also targeting consoles. Would it
kill them to compile and release unsupported Mac and Linux binaries?

~~~
Hammershaft
This is likely very much on Apple for depreciating OpenGL for a proprietary
standard, making cross platform development a hell of a lot of work for such a
niche market.

Combine that with the lack of Nvidea drivers and Macs are in an especially
dismal place for 3D gaming for the forseeable future.

------
parisidau
Shameless plug, I wrote a book on KSP (for O'Reilly!) with some friends:
[https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest-
Program/...](https://www.amazon.com/Kerbal-Players-Guide-Easiest-
Program/dp/1491913053/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=kerbal+space+program&qid=1566273650&s=gateway&sr=8-2)

------
twic
I spy an Orion AND a Daedalus - be still my beating nuclear heart!

------
Shivetya
Very nice they kept the pilots fairly simple and dressed up their surroundings
as much. granted as we seen in this video I suspect the much higher details
are going to lead to all sorts of videos people out doing each others for
disaster launches.

------
haberman
Love KSP and I'll be looking forward to this!

I really don't get cinematic trailers though. If it's not actual gameplay,
then what does it tell me about the game? What does it tell me that I don't
already know from KSP1?

~~~
Pfhreak
They are communicating their aspirations. That they want to do colonies. That
they want bigger stations. Interstellar travel. Multiplayer. Unusual drive
concepts.

And they tell you the tone. Note all the stuff crashing, but also the hopeful
message of expanding. It's an emotional appeal to you. It's a way to
communicate to your audience that, "Hey, we get you. We know what you want
from this series, and it's in good hands."

------
brianolson
I laughed, I cried, it was better than "Interstellar"

------
roddux
I wonder if version 2.0 is written in Unity? I hope not. I recall a lot of the
performance issues in KSP1 being blamed on the choice of engine...

~~~
crysin
Unity is not inherently bad. It's garnered that reputation because its super
easy to learn and make a somewhat workable game out of, even if you have
absolutely 0 understanding of the workings of your code. I'm not familiar with
Kerbal's code or any blogs / videos on it but I would imagine they're doing
Newtonion physics simulations which are going to be rather intense for a game
and probably add an unavoidable burden to the overall performance of the game.
They also could have just been doing things that are not efficient in Unity
and not realized at the time and maybe will not repeat the same mistakes in
Kerbal 2 if it is written in Unity. This meme that Unity is inferior to either
Unreal or a custom built engine are annoying. Sure, if the Kerbal team built
their own engine from the ground up and hired on their own engine team I'm
sure they'd be able to make micro-optimizations to make the game run better
but at a much higher development cost.

~~~
TylerE
Is it really a meme?

Every large AAA Unity game I've ever played has a certain jankyness to
it...microstutters, glitchy UI. At some point you just have to accept that the
common variable is: Unity.

~~~
Pfhreak
It definitely is a meme. Cuphead, Hearthstone, Ori, Cities Skylines,
Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Subnautica, Hollow Knight... There's a bunch of
great games made with the engine that I've never seen issues with, many of
these games are performance sensitive as well.

Edit: Maybe you could provide a few examples of games with those issues?

~~~
TylerE
Games like Cuphead or Hollow Knight I wouldn’t call AAA games.

Cities Skyline is the poster child (well besides KSP) of Unity Jankiness. Just
look at how many mods there to fix basic things in Skyline.

~~~
Pfhreak
Ok. Sure, those are games made by small teams. Still, they have a high degree
of polish and depend on good, consistent performance because the combat
requires precision.

I suspect that KSP is janky because of KSP (or because it was built on a very
old Unity and ported over across many engine versions.)

------
ansible
Scott Manley has a reaction video to the trailer:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D353IVwY_1g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D353IVwY_1g)

He seems to think it holds promise and is looking forward to playing it.

------
shostack
Is KSP1 any fun for casual gamers with only an hour or two and a joystick?
Will I have to read up on lots of math and orbital mechanics to get anywhere
in it?

~~~
BitwiseFool
No math needed at all. It's hard to explain, but you end up understanding
orbital mechanics visually and by feel. It's really just a game about speeding
up and slowing down.

~~~
derefr
Is there a space game where there _is_ math required? I'd like to play a game
where I'm less of an aerospace engineer, and more of a 1960s astronaut, doing
Emergency Slide-Rule Sums™️ during landing.

~~~
dTal
"Orbiter" might be what you're looking for. It's less "game" and more "sim".
There are computerized aids for most things, but you don't have to use them.
You might find that rather challenging, though - even 1960s astronauts had
electronic computers!

Bonus - it's free. I've burned a lot of hours in Orbiter.

[http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/](http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/)

------
abledon
what was the song playing during the trailer?

edit: M83 - Outro

------
astrodust
"Multiplayer/Modding"

I'm in.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Oh yes. A proper multiplayer is the final thing I miss in KSP. I'm not really
sure how it could work reliably, given the need for regular timewarping, but I
would so _love_ to build and operate a space station with other players
simultaneously.

~~~
LoSboccacc
they promised the same for 1.0 so don't hold your breath

[https://www.pcgamer.com/kerbal-space-program-committed-to-
mu...](https://www.pcgamer.com/kerbal-space-program-committed-to-multiplayer-
career-and-sandbox-modes/)

I'm still mad because that article killed all momentum between the multiplayer
mod

------
nodesocket
I am so excited about this. Curious how the gameplay/graphics will be on Xbox.

------
mesozoic
Wait where are the Kerbals? I didn't see a single one. Looks like it's just
space flight simulator now or universe sandbox.

