I wonder what the modding support is going to actually be like. I'm the one of the two original coauthors of the Kopernicus mod (although I handed off developm

I wonder what the modding support is going to actually be like. I'm the one of the two original coauthors of the Kopernicus mod (although I handed off development of it to Dorian years ago when I got my first job after graduation because I was having trouble finding time while settling into working life). Writing that mod was already difficult as hell, because while the game supported mods, there was no SDK or any supporting documentation. There was essentially a gentleman's agreement between the KSP modding scene and the developers that ripping apart the game assemblies for the purposes of making mods wasn't didn't violate the terms of service, even though it explicitly forbid such activities. Building Kopernicus by spending days in the Mono .NET Assembly Decompiler figuring out how to override pieces of the game to make the custom solar systems was pretty darn fun though. I can't tell you how much time I spent trying to figure out how to programmatically make something that PSystem.systemPrefab would accept as a Unity Prefab object. Or the fun of learning about attributes in .NET to build a reflection based configuration system that would actually process KSP's configuration file format into said systemPrefab object. One of the things that the modding community felt at the time was that as Take-Two starting getting more aggressive about hiding the way the internals of the game worked (it's very murky if said gentleman's agreement is still in place), and in it's place producing some documentation, that the way forward may be just making an open source KSP-style game with original content and a completely different engine as to avoid any legal problems (we'd all seen how the internals of KSP worked, so we needed to make sure to do ours entirely differently). But no one (including myself) really ever found the time to work on it or made a serious effort to do so... If they solved the performance issues with large ships, and have somewhat more realistic physics (e.g. Lagrange points/Parking orbits are impossible in KSP), that may just be cause to drop the idea completely. I've mainly found my time spent exploring the depths of orbital integrators, Eric Bruneton's atmosphere paper, and Vulkan.