KSA - KSP clone on an in-house engine by Rocketwerkz (Stationeers dev) and former Kerbal devs and modders

[Hellraiser]

During the DRAMA surrounding the unfortunately rather unsurprising KSP 2 axing by T2 suits, the Rocketwerkz (lead?) studio guy claimed they had pitched KSP2 to Take 2 themselves but were shot down in favor of Star Theory games in the last round where 3 devs were considered for the project (the suits didn't like that they were all technical and had no concept art in the pitch). They continued to work on their custom engine using the BRUTAL C# framework (that I can't google for some reason), well they have a tech demo of the engine to show and some details, including that they snatched a bunch of former developers (hopefully Nertea, who returned to KSP modding after getting laid off with the rest of the KSP2 team and dumped an excellent Orion drive mod).

KSP modders/devs mentioned so far are HarvesteR, Blackrack and JPLRepo.

https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpac...he_ksp_replacement_from_rocketwerkz_seamless/



The demo I find unimpressive from a visual side, but I guess devil is in the details regarding how many entities it is tracking and how fast it runs (I mean it is 60 fps apparently). I think until they show an actual parts-based rocket flying around with physics simulated I'll be cautious if they can pull it off.

Here's the word from the horse's mouth on plebbit:

My game studio is RocketWerkz, we've made a few games most notably ICARUS and Stationeers. Originally I made the DayZ Mod. Incidentally prior to that I actually made a lot of KSP mods, in particular the Component Space Shuttle (CSS) and was very active on the KSP forums.

Our studio actually was in the bidding to make KSP2 and we made it to the top three bids. The final step was a call Private Division. I put a lot of work with the into a good design document and opted to keep the focus entirely on this design and the technical aspects of the project - this was a serious problem for two of the people on the call who said we were the only pitch that did not contain art. Obviously out studio wasn't chosen.
We have been working on custom technology to allow us to build games that really scale for some time now. This is called the BRUTAL Framework which is similar in approach to the older XNA Framework. The desciption:

BRUTAL is a C# game framework that is designed to be complicated, slow, and difficult to use.

KSP Team members + RocketWerkz
We have employed some of the original KSP and KSP2 team and a number of modders and expect the team to continue to grow. Here is a video demonstrating a unique approach we have been able to take with rendering, given BRUTAL gives us direct access to everything Vulkan can do.
There is also a key person we are still sorting out the exact details for but I'd love to introduce them once that is done. I think this person is a key individual in our industry as a whole and our studio will be backing them and their future endeavors as well.
The original crew are providing a lot of assistance and we are bringing technology, production, and approach from our own work.

Achieving Seamless movement
Instead of generating the terrain on the fly, at game load we generate a variety of spherical billboards using XML defined data. This means a modder making RSS can generate spherical billboards that might be necessary to give good terrain for different data sets. As the player gets closer to a planet we choose a different version of these spherical meshes. We can also do a lot of tricks that would be much harder in a traditional game engine, such as leaving the data on the GPU.

Dealing with Floating Point precision loss
The "size" of the values used for position need to be doubles for precision, but for rendering we realistically have to use floats. in KSP, HarvestR made an amazing solution that works in Unity for this. However in BRUTAL we have so many more options. In the video linked you can see that we don't have the usual precision issues. The camera is always rendering at 0,0,0 meaning that imprecision is pushed out to infinity.

Using Solar System Data for now
For testing purposes, we are using Solar System data. This is all fully moddable. The simulation is fully threaded. Are currently working on laying in close physics simulation using Jolt physics API - as we can instance this for each "scene" requiring data.

Next Steps
I will leave it to individual team members who are welcome to share what they are working on with the project. You can also follow the discord for live changlog and more information or to answer questions.
We will be making builds and data systems available to modders as early as possible to get feedback so we can restructure this to best support the project in future.
Feel free to ask me any questions here, and others in the team will reply also.

Discord: https://discord.gg/aCwHR7HJ4W

Not a fan of the name as they mentioned the K temporarily stands for Kitten, but it might be something different down the line to fit into the KSA acronym where SA is Space Agency.

If they manage to make multi-part rocket physics to work the project might eventually replace KSP 1 as a modding platform, I'm cautious until I see that working though. KSP 2 infamously ran abysmal in previews.

The core technical challenges of making a KSP clone/engine are killing the kraken/floating point issues at solar system scales, seamless performant planetary scale terrain rendering (which KSP 2 infamously failed at during launch) and the flight physics of the lego rockets made of hundreds of parts. They might have the first two solved going by the demo, but without knowing the hardware used, and without the other stuff a game has running simultanously hard to say how fast it is and if it is enough or ideally better than another Unity hackjob. And I think the part physics is a bitch, not sure if they're using a physics library for that or doing something themselves.

tl;dr there is light in the tunnel for KSP fans after KSP 2 failed as a project, and this light might not be launch exhaust going through a flame diverter right at you.

 

[Stavrophore]

Better than Juno New Origins? If they will put frogs again, then im out.

 

[Hellraiser]

Better than Juno New Origins? If they will put frogs again, then im out.

From that whole thread I got the impression they want to bend over to the much pissed off by Take 2 community, so the question is if the "I rather have humans" camp is loud enough.

You're definitely not alone on this judging by some other opionions I saw over the years, and I think a human but fake nation and not-earth/solar system would be a good choice. Also then they could make the K stand for whatever not-earth is called or the country. Or just go with Kosmos Space Agency for extra soviet space program reference points (despite being redundant as it means space, decent joke actually).

 

[Stavrophore]

Better than Juno New Origins? If they will put frogs again, then im out.

From that whole thread I got the impression they want to bend over to the much pissed off by Take 2 community, so the question is if the "I rather have humans" camp is loud enough.

You're definitely not alone on this judging by some other opionions I saw over the years, and I think a human but fake nation and not-earth/solar system would be a good choice. Also then they could make the K stand for whatever not-earth is called or the country. Or just go with Kosmos Space Agency for extra soviet space program reference points (despite being redundant as it means space, decent joke actually).

Humans and real parts are a big thing for me, i've played a lot of RSS/RO and wished there were no frogs around. Recreating moon landing or trying for mission to saturn with real parts, real scale and humanoids is infinitely more interesting to me, than messing around aimlessly with frogs, which always ended up for me to make elaborate colonies with resource management, because otherwise the game was kinda empty. Then you crash and burn with your game because KSP starts to run like complete ass with massive ships. The first thing they should focus is how to have good physics and good performance at the same time, juno use rigid/welded model, instead of KSP on part physic, so it runs better but lacks the KSP detail in physic interaction. I expect KSP successsor to solve that issue.