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HoloDust on 03 May 2015
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SvennoJ said:
HoloDust said:

I can go into usual AAA games, but I will just drop something that's been occupying me a lot lately (haven't played it for over a year, but now that 1.0 is out I'm all over it again):

Kerbal Space Program - amount of physics in it is such that it easily brings to its knees even modern high end CPUs when you build several thousand parts ships/space stations - orbital mechanics (and there's not even n-body simulation in there) and air drag while launching can be a bitch to calculate for each part.

That can be solved by adding all the parts together beforehand and calculate 1 or a few sets of profiles to be measured during take off.
KSP uses a brute force approach instead of a combined shape and power profile.
It did become very wobbly for huge spacecraft, plus the auto air stabilizers usually went nuts during take off.

Of course the fun of the game is how far you can push the brute force simulation until things start falling apart. Some of that might be lost with a combined shape. Is it going to reach orbit before it falls over, will that wobbly engine stack hold on long enough etc.

Well, never liked how stock KSP physics worked, it really does feel like flying through soup and not air, so, of course, I have both FAR and NEAR seperate instances of game installed to mess around, depending if I want to be masochistic or not.

I find 1.0 to improve a lot stock physics model, still joints still do seem too weak, I'll probably need to add at least ferram's joint reinforcements. But so far, I managed to make operational REL Skylon from stock parts, and that was a lot of fun - SSTOs are such a time sink and so much rewarding when you make them work.

Anyway, back to OP and KSP's relevance to it - I really don't think 6th or even 7th gen would be able to pull off something like this, especially if we add all the mods into the mix that vastly improve over vanilla.