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KSP2 is spamming the Windows Registry until the game stops working

forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com

211–220 of 306 posts

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

#211
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…

It's developer error. It'd be the same as a game on Linux filling up a conf file or a database with duplicates. Does Linux have mechanisms to guard against that? Didn't think so.

> Does Linux have mechanisms to guard against that?

Sure. ulimit or cgroups can.

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

#212
post #9

KSP2 had all the warning signs of being a disaster ever since the initial delays and controversies with the original studio. Unfortunately, as usual, the community put on hype blinders until it became impossible to ignore.

KSP1 is really complete, especially if you are using OKAN and common mods that people install. I don't understand what they are trying to do with KSP2 to begin with. Skeptical from the start and it somehow turned out worse.

KSP1 has actually atrophied quite a bit, as many of mods that are essentially necessary for serious play no longer work with the newer versions.

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

#213
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?

> 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. The Windows Registry is the NT Kernel's system config/preference store. The closest Linux equivalent is dconf. Like dconf it is built to be a read-mostly/read-optimized database. It's not as strongly focused on a service-bus architecture as dconf. It tries to heavil…

A bit weird that cross platform apps use dot files or dot directories directly in %Home% on Windows. If they already are cross platform, thus taken the time and resources to do that, why not add a compile flag to move them into %AppData%?

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

#214
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…

How could they not notice this?

I can understand not noticing the extra writes; but doesn't this mean that they were never loading the proper value, always loading the default, if the new key was always unique?

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

#215
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's always annoyed me with many operating systems is this need to organize based on function instead of domain. If I install an application named "Bob" then I want ALL of Bob's configuration to live within Bob. I don't want it split between different registry keys or /usr/local, /etc/, /var, /lib, etc. I'm fine with there being conventions and categorizations, but I'd like to root node to be the application itself…

This exists for a while now, but didn't catch on: https://gobolinux.org/at_a_glance.html

Yes exactly.

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

#216
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…

> So, somebody didn't notice a "changes every game" instance ID was in the path and/or data. They thought they were overwriting a single key.

Becsuse messing with Windows registry is a recommended action. /s

What's wrong with game config files ?

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

#218
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…

How could they not notice this?

It wasn't found in unit tests. /s

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

#219
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?

The database-backed configuration mechanism makes a ton of sense, and if you squint, the filesystem is really kind of a database anyway. With the registry, there’s a lot you get for free—you can set defaults system-wide, you don’t have to deal with parsing, you can get new values without re-parsing a file, etc. A lot of the horror stories came from earlier versions of Windows which had problems with reliability. If y…

> the filesystem is really kind of a database anyway

I thought ReFS was a failure. /s

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

#220
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The jank was acceptable because it was supposed to be a simple 2D game that ended up outgrowing it's diapers as it grew, and being a Unity project a long time ago, was stuck on abysmal physics systems. It couldn't NOT be jank. Everyone always "wanted" a better physics system or game engine entirely, because KSP1 was often held back by Unity, but that would have definitely killed the project.

Then KSP2 is like, still on Unity? Despite massive amounts of budget and like no compelling reason to stay on Unity with the backing of a real game company.

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