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KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

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Re: KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

#181

Post by nullindividual »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #159
msla wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The performance part is questionable, as is the discoverability: Programs write binary blobs to impossible-to-find keys and, as we see here, there's nothing preventing a severe loss of performance if the program writes too much to the registry. It can only be examined with specialized tools, and, due to the binary values written to it, it might not be meaningfully editable at all.

There's also no mechanism for the OS to offer the user the ability to purge registry entries when a program is uninstalled, so the registry just bloats further and further.

This is no different with most Linux distributions or macOS. When applications are deployed and create configuration files (system-wide or user), they're often not removed when deleting the application.

Re: KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

#182

Post by tredre3 »

ilyt wrote: post #148
Xeamek wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because if I go to /etc or /var and delete some random thing, linux is just magical and nothing will possible break. Cut the crap

No, you cut the crap. /etc can be entirely readonly to most apps, many of them also either wont start from root or drop permissions right after loading. That is not the case for registry, far more ways to fuck up.

To delete system-wide things in the registry you will be prompted to escalate to admin privilege. It's usually one click.

To delete things in /etc you will be asked to gain root privilege. It's usually one click (You might be asked to confirm your password).

Deleting things when admin/root can break things in both cases.

Let's just admit it and move on.

Re: KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

#183

Post by nullindividual »

hotnfresh wrote: post #153
echelon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from a Linux background, what is the windows registry and why do things need to write to it? All I ever read about it seem to be horror stories. Can't you store stuff alongside the install? Or in some user data location?

It’s /etc but harder to browse and edit. Or, from the contrary perspective: it’s the 500 places config lives on Linux, but in one place instead. (Except it still has a deep hierarchical structure, so that second one is kiiiinda not entirely true, in that you can run into exactly the same issues as scattered config files on Linux)

You can search for keys and values across all loaded hives. This makes finding things in the registry much easier.

Editing, sure, you've got essentially a single GUI application and CLI or programmatic access. Your options are certainly more limited than the plethora of text editors available.

Re: KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

#184

Post by evilduck »

aqme28 wrote: post #91
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has jank, but I don't know anyone who stopped playing because of it.

The jank was sometimes part of the fun

The jank was also forgivable when it was a one man effort or a very small team. Plus it was a relatively novel idea for the game being created for the first time. It also made no grandeur promises of what was to come, and continually made improvements.

Take Two and KSP2 have none of the same forgivable qualities.

Re: KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

#185

Post by Xeamek »

ilyt wrote: post #148
Xeamek wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because if I go to /etc or /var and delete some random thing, linux is just magical and nothing will possible break. Cut the crap

No, you cut the crap. /etc can be entirely readonly to most apps, many of them also either wont start from root or drop permissions right after loading. That is not the case for registry, far more ways to fuck up.

Hold on, You pivoting.

The paragraph you quoted is in context warning the user about MANUAL intervention in the registry, that requires privileged access. So we aren't comparing it to "what can random app do", but what can super user do.

Re: KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

#186

Post by vardump »

throeaaysn wrote: post #177
vardump wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"high-performance" We might have differing opinions about that. (I've got experience for example in Windows kernel mode drivers and service development.)

[dead]

No guesstimates, but it's generally very bad.

Especially when there's some corporate "security" software in the loop. And that's the case you have to really code against.

Re: KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

#187

Post by bragr »

dotnet00 wrote: post #13
bragr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More saliently they did all that but also set a full retail price on the EA game as well.

It gets worse because they don't consider the current $50 price to be 'full price'. They claim it's the discounted EA price and full retail would be higher.

I didn't think I could be more annoyed at them, but I guess not! -_-

Re: KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

#188

Post by philwelch »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #22
Pannoniae wrote: post #6

Not surprised at all; KSP as a franchise is in the enshittification stage where they aim to invest the minimum amount of money and maximise returns. This is just simply inexcusable software engineering and quality control. Bit tangential but I'd like to remind everyone that this is the game where the lead designer (?) said that wobbly rockets and physics bugs are adding to the fun of the game, and they are implemente…

KSP2 isn't an enshittification play, imo. It's literally just bad project management. I'll list their sins from my armchair: - remaking a beloved, established game that has a prodigious base of features and extremely extensive modding support. you have a HUGE hill to climb just to get to your "MVP" - you have to supplant the existing game plus its modding community, and this is already a niche audience of ["people wh…

The root problem with KSP2 is that they needed to make the core of the game perform much better than KSP1 in order to pull off the scale of what they intended to achieve. And then the they shipped into EA with significantly worse performance than KSP1.

Re: KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

#189

Post by kortex »

pathartl wrote: post #85
kortex wrote: post #8

It feels like the Windows Registry is one of those well-intentioned ideas that ended up being a tremendous mess in actual implementation. "Let's use a central database to store things that the OS, drivers, and UI need to access" somehow became "half assed KV dumping ground for every process and their dog to litter with whatever while acting as a singular bottleneck". See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=322…

Most games that _do_ use the registry use it as a data store that may or may not be accessed by external applications. It provides a very reliable pathing (at least at the time of the game's release) to access typed data. For instance, most EA games from the early 2000's standardized the store of the CD key in ~HKLM:\SOFTWARE\ \ergc. This would let one install the game to any drive and still have access to the CD key…

Those sound like exactly the use cases the registry should be used for. However in practice all kinds of state ends up in there that does not need to be accessed by anything other than the game process.

Re: KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

#190

Post by zeusk »

jncfhnb wrote: post #105
tyingq wrote: post #4

One of the comments mentions this: "Alright, doing some investigating it seems that they are saving the Pqs preferences based off of the instance ID of the pqs object, which, according to unity's own documentation, changes between runs of the game, hence why its saving 10 trillion different copies of the same data" So, somebody didn't notice a "changes every game" instance ID was in the path and/or data. They thought…

Somewhere a unity exec has just figured out the new metric that determines their royalty pay rate.

Are you sure it isn't based on number of instructions retired by the CPU? or the number of pixels rendered by the game?
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