Having watched Scott Manley talking about the two. One, Kitten isn’t fully out yet, it’s mostly a tech demo right now. Two, Kitten is built on a 64 bit engine, so it can actually accurately stimulate a solar system (a LOT of the “Kraken” physics in KSP was due to the 32 bit engine). As far as I know they’re trying to make Kitten to be KSP but better. Like a KSP 2
Comment on Kerbal Space Program spiritual successor Kitten Space Agency now has a Linux version
MehBlah@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
This is a question for someone who has played both. What does kitten bring to this type of game that ksp missed?
chuckleslord@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 13 hours ago
ksp sort of stimulated my solar system…
piccolo@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
KSP has been 64bit for a long while now.
CyberSeeker@discuss.tchncs.de 19 hours ago
Active development
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 hours ago
I haven’t played KSA yet, forgot that it was a thing, but one of the big ones is a custom engine as opposed to the cobbled together mess of code that is KSP, which is running on an engine that is absolutely not meant to do what KSP does. All the weird physics glitches in KSP are because it’s trying to wrangle the engine into functioning in this way.
KSP2 was actually supposed to fix this as well with a brand new engine, but the publisher forced them to use KSP’s engine “because it would be faster” (it wasn’t).
mech@feddit.org 18 hours ago
A functional physics engine.
Thinking back to KSP, it really was kinda weird what you had to put up with.
Even without doing anything fancy or big, you’d constantly lose craft to physics glitches.
neidu3@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Building the game from scratch with an engine suitable for the purpose. As me turned numerous times by Harvester who created KSP: There are so many hacks and workarounds to make Unity work the way they need it to, and in retrospect Unity was not a suitable choice for a game in that scale. And it is doubtful that any engine is.
Rocketwerkz are making their own engine, doing away the Scenes/Actors limitation that are detrimental to how a space game would work. This removes a ton of abstractions resulting in an alpha that runs incredibly smoothly almost independent of part cound, with physics during time warp.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
Oh nice, good job on making and updating a community on this, I’ll keep this in mind
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 14 hours ago
Something I liked in KSP was building based on moons, would love it if that is less janky and more useful.
neidu3@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
I would love base building in KSA, but Dean Hall (CEO of Rocketwerkz) have explicitly stated that he refuses to say anything on the matter, because Colonies means so many things to different people. In my case, Colonies would mean resource extraction, building/designing a fully fledged launch centers, and (semi-automated) interplanetary logistics, a
homura1650@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
KSA seems to be modder friendly; to the point that there early releases were for the expressed purpose of getting modder input.
They also seem to still be in the core tech development stage. I suspect the details of what actual gameplay looks like will be flushed out through iterative development with player feedback.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 14 hours ago
Yeah that is what I liked doing with KSP mods. My last long playthrough was using USI mods and that at least partially gets away from the jank by abstracting the majority of the bases across the solar system to a spreadsheet with no parts used, including interplanetary logistics. Then you just need a few parts where you want to take some actual resources out to use them for something.
I got to the point of having fuel stations around orbit of Kerbin and both of its moons, also had rare mineral mining going to make cash. If I play again the next step is to start mining and refining useful amounts of metals so that my orbital ship assembly doesn’t need to import quite so much mass from the space centre. Start with mining to make the heavy bits first and then over time build more and more of the production chain myself in space so fewer and fewer things need to be launched into space.
Once all that stuff is done, start looking to other planets as well. Although I often ran quite a few simultaneous missions so already got probes heading out to most planets. At least tiny probes if nothing else, as once its small enough it doesn’t really need to be the most efficient launch window. Just burn an extra 2000dV of fuel which is only about 100kg? Sure, this rocket is so cheap it doesn’t really matter.