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Upcoming KSP 1.1 changes #64

Open Aqua-KSP opened 9 years ago

Aqua-KSP commented 9 years ago

Squad said that the coming Unity 5 update introduces a new GUI and wheel system. For KF it means that everything will break.

So how much work do you want to put into KF until 1.1 arrives? We don't know how much changes there will be and we maybe have to start all over again.

KerbalFoundries commented 9 years ago

A good point well made! Having done a bit of reading, I think the fundamental change for us will, of course, be wheel colliders. They're a little different in their behaviour and dynamics, so some amount of recoding will be needed there, but nothing major. Thankfully the rest of our features should not be effected, though the particles give us more options. The GUI is a different matter; that will likely be a major task. We ought to be careful about which features we do work on from now until then, but most we have in the list are unity version independent as far as I can see. Thoughts?

Aqua-KSP commented 9 years ago

I don't think the change on wheel colliders are small. According to this dev blog the old wheel parts don't work reliably in U5 and that's why they bought Vehicle Physics Pro to replace them. VPP adds a lot of fun stuff, like a gearbox and a clutch. See here. I've got a USB steering wheel and pedals. I wonder if KSP will support them. ^^

There's a forum post about the new UI and I see a river of tears. I think it's best to stick to the advice to wait. Maybe Squad really releases a wrapper for simpler GUI building.

I'll estimate at least a week, probably two weeks, for figuring out the new GUI. I guess we'll have to recode the wheels completely to adapt the new system to our needs. That would take... two weeks? A month? Don't know.

KerbalFoundries commented 9 years ago

I think Squad are just being lazy in buying vehicle physics; a lot of the stuff Harv is talking about having to do is stuff KF handles already. To be fair, they made half a job of the existing module! I've got U5 and will play about with the new colliders outside KSP to get a feel. Just haven't got round to it yet

Agreed on the gui, I have a feeling that will be the greatest challenge...

KerbalFoundries commented 9 years ago

I've just done some extra reading. It looks to me like the U5 colliders actually have more realistic grip and suspension models and people don't know how to configure them. The old ones are "stable" because their physics models are crap. Thankfully, I have a background in motorsport, so I know how a wheel behaves. I am hopeful :)

Gaalidas commented 9 years ago

As for the GUI side of things, I think it's much the same as it is with the wheels. the new system will likely be a lot more powerful and easy to use in the long run, but the people trying to figure it out right now for KSP modding purposes are simply not understanding how to work it without a working example (something I can understand completely). With that in mind, the transition won't be smooth, but the end result should be great.