KSP2 is such a sad situation all around. The guys working on it had the same idea and were going to build a brand new engine for it to fix the tech debt of the original, but management demanded that they use the original engine “to speed up development time.”
My understanding was that KSP2 was originally going to be just a slightly cleaned up re-release of KSP1. A remaster if you will. Buy up some existing mods, bundle them in, clean up the UI a bit and enjoy the fruits of this new definitive edition of the game. But the team was able to convince Take2 to try to replace the game engine as part of that remaster and truly make it worth while (hence the 4 year delay from the original release date)
The original idea that was sold to the public was essentially “Kerbal Space Program, but bigger.” I couldn’t tell you all of the details or the timetable, but there were a lot of new features planned from the start (a number of which were mods of the first game) including fixing issues that were present in the original and adding things far outside the scope of the first game like multiplayer, colonies, and FTL travel to a new solar system. The dev team openly talked about creating a new engine to fix the physics bugs and such, at least.
I don’t know what happened along the way, but it’s pretty clear that the KSP2 that we have has the engine of the first game in it, as to this day it has many of the same bugs.
My guess is that the team originally planned on a new engine, but at some point, management stepped in and demanded that they use the old engine. IIRC, there was some restructuring that happened during the development - both in taking the project away from the original dev studio working on it, and then restructuring the team that was working on it, so it could’ve happened at some point during that.
KSP2 is such a sad situation all around. The guys working on it had the same idea and were going to build a brand new engine for it to fix the tech debt of the original, but management demanded that they use the original engine “to speed up development time.”
My understanding was that KSP2 was originally going to be just a slightly cleaned up re-release of KSP1. A remaster if you will. Buy up some existing mods, bundle them in, clean up the UI a bit and enjoy the fruits of this new definitive edition of the game. But the team was able to convince Take2 to try to replace the game engine as part of that remaster and truly make it worth while (hence the 4 year delay from the original release date)
The original idea that was sold to the public was essentially “Kerbal Space Program, but bigger.” I couldn’t tell you all of the details or the timetable, but there were a lot of new features planned from the start (a number of which were mods of the first game) including fixing issues that were present in the original and adding things far outside the scope of the first game like multiplayer, colonies, and FTL travel to a new solar system. The dev team openly talked about creating a new engine to fix the physics bugs and such, at least.
I don’t know what happened along the way, but it’s pretty clear that the KSP2 that we have has the engine of the first game in it, as to this day it has many of the same bugs.
My guess is that the team originally planned on a new engine, but at some point, management stepped in and demanded that they use the old engine. IIRC, there was some restructuring that happened during the development - both in taking the project away from the original dev studio working on it, and then restructuring the team that was working on it, so it could’ve happened at some point during that.