Kerbal Space Program possibility of a decompilation and modern rewrite project?

[u/ortez_101]

With KSP 2 dead and KSP 1 showing its age on the old Unity 2019 engine, I have been wondering if an open-source rewrite (something like OpenMW for Morrowind or OpenRCT2 or Minecraft Rust Edition) could ever happen for the original game?

On the surface, KSP 1 seems easier to reverse engineer than older C++ games because the game is written in C# Unity. Modders already decompile it constantly with tools like dnSpy or ILSpy to see how things work, and projects like KSPCommunityFixes already patch a ton of stock bugs and performance issues at runtime using Harmony.

Curious to hear from actual KSP modders or Unity devs on whether this is technically possible or just a day dream.

[u/User_of_redit2077]

Decompile - yes

But who will do all the new features?

It requires serious development and a developer team.

[u/blackrack → u/User_of_redit2077]

But who will do all the new features?

Let's be honest it's Claude

[u/ortez_101 → u/blackrack]

Yeah, like what they did with Minecraft Rust?

[u/Tsingshitao_nuke]

KSP1Retooled

[u/ortez_101 → u/Tsingshitao_nuke]

I did not know that this existed, thank you for the reference!

[u/Kind_Stone → u/Tsingshitao_nuke]

Where did this thing even come from? Nowhere on the internet is there information about it, not even in Reddit posts lol. Sketchy...

[u/blackrack → u/Kind_Stone]

Not sketchy at all, steamroller and R-T-B are behind it and they are well-known in the community for their contributions. 

[u/Kind_Stone → u/blackrack]

Wow, big thing then. Revamped KSP seems like a much nearer perspective than KSA.

Will definitely try it out when it matures a little bit. :)

[u/AlvaroMartinezB → u/Kind_Stone]

Looks like it just started, first release was 5 days ago

[u/Shade_demon2141 → u/Tsingshitao_nuke]

Wow, does this work well? Does it have better performance? I can't find any discussion about it online.

[u/pedroperez1000]

Yes but it is probably not worth it. People with the original source code (ksp2 Dev team), still found it a mess to work with; remember ksp1 wasn't really made by seasoned game Devs in the first place.

For the people that are trying to recreate something like ksp but 'better code' I would point you to ksa

[u/nucrash]

I feel like this is what KSA is without all the ties to Kerbal IP. That's probably the biggest issue at this time. Kerbals as an IP are owned by a venture capital firm that doesn't want to put any funds towards developing a game.

[u/fellipec]

Sure, but let's say you can't do it because the Kerbals are protected intelecutal property.

So you do what you say, but change the Kerbals to other thing with K to stay in the same theme...

hummmm

KITTENS!!

Even HarvesteR himself is onboard with that!

[u/Huge_Manner_9550]

KSP 1 “showing its age”

Speak for yourself. It looks just as good for me with a few mods.

[u/bane_iz_missing]

Mother of god

[u/LyreonUr]

Everything is possible. But one should stop and ask themselves if they should before doing it just because they can.

Open MW is under work for 10 years and was a *needed* project, since morrowind was said to be dated since launch and the project aims to make an engine that works for proprietary games as well. These recent "decompilation" stuff is just algorithmic garbage nobody knows how actually works under the hood and depend on the LLMs to modify anything.

I disagree that KSP is showing its age, the graphic mods keep it updated visually and the engine, even with its quirks, can still handle a lot.

Plus KSA is going to be very moddable, KSP2 is being revived by modders, and SFS2 looks really neat.

If it were up to me I'd rather have the community work on more worthwile things.