Unite 2013 - KSP

I almost feel obligated to write a bit more about KSP after watching a video from the Developers talking about some of the various strategies they took to building the game. First of all, I am actually pretty impressed at some of the techniques they used to approach the problems they encountered. Not only did they solve them, they did a pretty good job with it as well.

I'm curious as to why they picked using double floating point numbers instead of 64-bit fixed point numbers for the orbital mechanics. I mean precision is really a big deal when dealing with large scales so using something like integers where 1000 represents 1 meter would sound like a better idea. If you used 64-bit signed integers, they can hold 18446744073709551616 values... or more exactly, give you the range of 9223372036854775.808 meters both directions from an origin with 1mm precision. For comparison:

9460730472580800 = 1 light-year

9223372036854775.808

And you would have highly deterministic 'floating-point' errors at all scales. If you can count 1mm as a floating point error... And if that is the case you could always 'add' more decimal digits.

I do love how the re-entry effects were done, pretty awesome. Even more cool to know the same effects are used for showing high speed air drag and such. The planetary models were done in a very smart way and I have absolutely nothing to disagree with the approach taken. I also found the multi-camera rendering to be pretty cool. Treating each layer separately and then rendering them on top of each other. Considering I had never noticed it, Squad did a pretty good job with it.

I look forward to seeing what else is done with KSP as some really cool techniques have been applied to create a Solar System scale game.