Kitten Space Agency is a promising upcoming space simulation game that's pretty much a spiritual successor to Kerbal Space Program and now for Linux too.
Building the game from scratch with an engine suitable for the purpose. As mentioned numerous times by Harvester who created KSP: There are so many hacks and workarounds to make Unity work the way they needed it to, and in retrospect Unity was not a suitable choice for a game of that scale. And it is doubtful that any general-purpse 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.
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
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.
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 simulate 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
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).
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.
This is a question for someone who has played both. What does kitten bring to this type of game that ksp missed?
Building the game from scratch with an engine suitable for the purpose. As mentioned numerous times by Harvester who created KSP: There are so many hacks and workarounds to make Unity work the way they needed it to, and in retrospect Unity was not a suitable choice for a game of that scale. And it is doubtful that any general-purpse 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.
Something I liked in KSP was building based on moons, would love it if that is less janky and more useful.
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
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.
Oh nice, good job on making and updating a community on this, I’ll keep this it mind
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 simulate 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
ksp sort of stimulated my solar system…
KSP has been 64bit for a long while now.
Active development
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).
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.