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by dathinab 998 days ago
> should have been developed in it's own engine since it's so unique among other games

with my limited technical knowledge about game programming and much less limited technical knowledge about software development in general this seems quite wrong

because while the game is somewhat unique in some point, in many many(1) other technical points it's not, so by using a game engine you can save a lot of time/problems with all the points it's not unique in and just either replace or adapt the parts where it is

so while Unity might very well have been a bad choice

the general idea of using an existing game engine was not

(1): Like window handling, input handling, asset loading/packing/bundling/compression, parts of game saving, most parts related to the rendering pipeline, menus, statistics/crash reporting, installers, and probably more.

Through this is also how game engines rot: By not maintaining many of the build in components leading to any non very simple game needing to replace them all the time. I think Unity had been going into that direction.

2 comments

KSP is a game that routinely runs into floating point related problems and a game that needs deterministic physics simulations to be accurate and glitch free at all simulation speeds in the vacuum of space and inside the atmosphere of a planet.
yes so you need to replace the physics engine

this still leaves quite a lot of parts you do not need to replace

The "some point" is the main selling point of KSP. The "many other" technical points are beside the point. If you get the small things right but fail at the most important part, you fail overall.
I think you missed the point of my comment.

developing games is cost and time constrained

if you can use a existing engine and not wast resources on all the things which are not the main selling point and in turn spend more resources on getting the main selling point right, why should you not do so?

AFIK few, probably non of the more successful established game engine force you to use their physics engine