Kerbal Space Program

[Drax]

KAC?

 

[Hellraiser]

Kerbal Alarm Clock. Don't leave Kerbin's SoI without it.

 

[Drax]

Ah, right. Yes, it's pretty indispensable.

 

[Ulminati]

Still hoping for a vanilla implementation of KAS, SCANSat, RemoteTech, TAC, Docking Alignment Indicator, Kerbal Engineer, DMagic, EVE and IR

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

mhm... EVE? that's the only abbreviation I don't recognize...

 

[Hellraiser]

mhm... EVE? that's the only abbreviation I don't recognize...

Environmental Visual Enhancement, the plugin that makes Astronomer's pack and other eye candy packs work.

In other news, stock resources, or resource since we know it will basically be a single one like Kethane or Karbonite (though stock code will be allowing multiple for easier modding), that can be turned into LF and OX:

I just hope it will require different drills for different environments.

Heatshields will be put on a lot of parts, they're still deciding if they should be put in the game as a separate part (they should if only to allow ambitious aerocapture ships). Re-entry heat will be a toggled option.

Warp to point confirmed inferior to KAC, but probably faster to use to just warp to point. Just not for managing multiple launches and missions.

Engine rebalancing, 48-7s engine getting nerfed, lots of changes, lots of guides will get thrown out of the window.

Every engine that doesn't have one yet will get a nickname similar to the Poodle (who uses that?) Mainsail and Skipper, the LV-909 is now a "Terrier" while that large SRB that they added in the ARM patch is the "Kickback".

Due to the size of the update development on this will take longer (probably until late April if you ask me).

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Thanks Hellraiser. I use Renaissance pack, and never paid attention what's inside.

 

[Ulminati]

No more 64-bit! Kiss your mods goodbye!

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/328-The-future-of-Windows-64-bit-builds-for-KSP

Hi all,

As many of you will most definitely know, Kerbal Space Program has a Windows 64-bit version available to players. We’ve offered this version for a number of past releases of KSP and as of late (0.25 and 0.90, in particular), it has become very apparent that this version has been consistently less stable than all others. This level of instability means that the Windows 64-bit build falls far short of what we would consider a release-worthy product, and we will therefore not be releasing it for version 1.0 of Kerbal Space Program*.

We’ve spent a considerable amount of time investigating the reasons for these issues. The QA & Experimental Testing Teams have assisted in this research as have the community - something that we are very grateful for.

However, despite these efforts and although we have identified a number of probable causes for the instability, there is a very hard limit on what can be done on our end. Most platform-specific issues stem from parts of the engine we have no direct access to, and we simply can’t debug these problems in the same way we’d do with normal KSP bugs. We often can’t even reproduce them in our development environment, so we’re limited to guessing at both the causes and solutions.

In short, there are no easy fixes we can do here, and we feel that the time we would be potentially wasting on attempting to increase the stability of the Windows 64-bit version of KSP would be far better spent on other improvements which would reach as many players as possible. We can all agree there is no shortage of other things we could be working on.

We’re not giving up on the 64-bit build for Windows, though. The most we can do at the moment, however, is continue testing the Windows 64-bit build at each new version of Unity, and release it if viable. Additionally, we must take this opportunity to stress that Unity 5 - while a definite leap in the capabilities, performance and development power of the engine - is not going to inherently be a ‘cure all’ for issues, particularly in the matter of the instability of the Windows 64-bit build.

We’re aware that some of you have come to embrace the Windows 64 bit version by this point and that our decision to discontinue development for this particular build may be an inconvenience to some, but we trust everyone will understand the necessity that prompted this decision. At any rate, we want to thank everyone for their efforts in assisting in all bug finding and bug fixing efforts for KSP, as well as the modding community for their efforts in dealing with a rather unstable platform.

We hope you’re all looking forward to 1.0! We’ll be sharing more news with you as development continues.

*Note that this doesn't affect those that run KSP on 64-bit versions of Windows, only those that run the 64-bit Windows version of KSP.

Additionally, the 64-bit build for Linux is still planned to be released for 1.0.

Nevermind.

 

[Drax]

Well, it was really shitty and buggy, a good move, IMO.

 

[Ulminati]

It had some issues, sure. But if you wanted to run with a lot of mods, you either went 64bit or it crashed on start-up.

If you're only playing with 2-3 mods or vanilla it's fine. But don't expect to be running multiple part mods + hires textures in 32 bit. Doesn't matter to me since I can just play on linux though.

 

[Drax]

That's true, but many of my must-have mods had disclaimers saying "Using this mod in the 64 bit version WILL KILL YOUR FAMILY AND SEVERAL PANDAS", so I mostly ignored it...
I have a medium - heavy load order and with ATM, it runs... well. True, I'm not using any superheavy texture mod but for part mods it's good enough...

I'm not saying having a 64bit version is useless but THIS version was unstable as shit, and until Unity fixes it's crap, there's not much they can do.

 

[Ulminati]

Well, they're releasing 64 bit for Linux, so I don't really care. Sux2b windows I guess, r00fles.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

We live in strange times, when a cool game works better on Linux than on Windows.

 

[Jaedar]

Thankfully, linux is free and easily dual booted.

 

[Hellraiser]

Some news on expanding Kerbal Skills. Apparently engineers will learn to estimate delta-v of the craft and scientists will be more, uh, sciency? Pilots are also supposed to get some new tricks.

 

[Drax]

Devnote Tuesday: “Point sharp end towards space”

Felipe (HarvesteR): Many tweaks and additions to talk about this week. The Stability overlay has been progressing slowly, so that’s on the backburner for a bit, to make time to take care of other issues that were still pending. I’ve been helping out with integrating the new aerodynamics in, and doing new tweaks and improvements to the lift and control surface modules. The old infiniglide issue is now a thing of the past. With the new V² lift model, it took on much more severe proportions, and wasn’t something we could ignore anymore. Other than that, I’ve been going over other areas of the game which needed improvement, mainly around the input handling systems.

Since version 0.18 and the addition of docking, we’ve had this docking control mode which very few players ever got around to using. I didn’t remove that, but I did come up with a more elegant way to implement the control binding switching, so we could do away with all those duplicate input mappings on the settings screen. Now, there is only one input mapping for pitch, yaw, roll and linear translations, and the docking mode mapping is done using the secondary key bindings and a new state toggling system which is simpler and more flexible than the old way. So much more flexible, in fact, that you can now use docking mode as an alternate control scheme in any way you want. Rather use it to swap about yaw and roll inputs for controlling rockets and spaceplanes with a joystick? Now you can. Also, Axis bindings now also have secondary mappings of their own, so you can have a second axis bound to each action, either as a redundancy or with a different set of UI mode toggles.

Aside from the input revision, I’ve also gone over the Engines code, and tweaked them so that now throttle regulates the fuel flow rate, instead of the final thrust. That means fuel flow stays constant, and as Isp changes as you leave the atmosphere, thrust output increases (as opposed to thrust staying constant and fuel consumption changing).

And last but certainly not least, I’ve done a complete revision of the old Chase camera mode. Now, instead of being completely attached to the vessel in a motion sickness inducing way, it pivots about a coordinate system defined by your velocity vector, or the direction of a targeted object, if any. I’ve also fixed all camera modes not responding to input during coordinate frame transitions. That allows the new Chase cam to switch reference frames on the fly without any rapid changes in orientation (which lead to motion sickness). I have to say, it’s quickly becoming my new favorite cam mode.

Alex (aLeXmOrA): Been working on web tasks for other Squad projects.

Mike (Mu): The aero update continues unabated. I have reworked the atmospheric model into something a little more based on reality, this makes for easier balancing and configuring of other atmospheres. It now includes temperature into the equations and has a much more realistic pressure/density curve. Have also been getting constant feedback from the QA team on how it’s flying and tweaking the balance and models. There are some funky new debug displays for the aerodynamics and even a graph or two for those who will want to delve into things a little deeper.

Marco (Samssonart): Maxmaps and I reviewed the Reddit feedback we got on how the community thinks we should go about overhauling the tutorials and we began working on it accordingly, the majority seems to think that in terms of number of tutorials and variety we’re not doing that bad, we’re just going to expand the basic flight tutorial to cover a whole flight to orbit, and make it less text and more action oriented, we’re also going to add a rendezvous tutorial, because a lot of people think the difficulty leap between getting to Mun and back and catching an asteroid is too big, we need that missing link to give it more continuity and easing that transition. There were a couple more things that surfaced when looking at Reddit’s opinions, most people think there are way too many key bindings to remember, which is true, although there’s not much we can do about it, since KSP is a complex game with many actions, so I thought of adding a little key binding reminder during flight, sort of what you get in fighting games, just a screen that lets you see the key bindings you currently have assigned in a case sensitive manner, e.g. if you’re on EVA you will only see the relevant key bindings for EVA, if you’re in Map View you will only see what you can do in Map View and so on, in order to prevent a wall of text that won’t be of much help. The final conclusion we drew from the survey is that some people think the docking UI mode is basically useless, but we still haven’t decided what we’re going to do about it, other than gather more intel.

Jim (Romfarer): I just wanted to clear up some misconceptions about the Engineer’s Report design concern feature. Last week I said I was concerned about performance on some of the tests. The design concern feature is not a list of parts a vessel has and has not. It is a set of tests which analyze your vessel for possible issues you may run into. For example a big part of these tests are dealing with resource flow and will prompt when you have resource containers which are not being drained, consumers (such as engines) not getting the fuel they need, etc. And for every of these tests the parts in question are highlighted. This means the tests have to run every time you attach and detach a part and in the case of stack resource flow the system has to check for every resource container, and then trace back from the consumers which of these containers are not being drained.

Max (Maxmaps): I’ve been working closely with Samssonart to improve our tutorials, and also overseeing everything regarding the aero update, which turned out to be larger and far cooler than originally planned. This is a good thing. Also got to sit down with danRosas to plan the eventual 1.0 animation, and it’s looking like the best one so far. Other than that, my life is meetings, emails and emails that lead to meetings, signing contracts and shaking hands when physically possible. Merch deals are fun.

Ted (Ted): QA Team and I are plugging away at aero testing. As I’m sure many of you know, aerodynamics is no simple feature to both code and test and it’s been an incredibly rewarding, yet challenging, iterative testing and development process. Nevertheless, the developers, QA team and I have been making great progress on it and it’s really shaping up to be a very solid foundation that we can now tweak and balance to a good polish.

Additionally, I’ve been spending the past day setting up an OSX testbed here in order to further address any OSX issues that our players are encountering. Having rarely used OSX/Apple products before, I’ve been struggling with the Windows/Linux mindset but thankfully seem to be shaking it.

Lastly, I’ve been doing a bit of work on our QA Team’s internal documentation in order to ensure that we’re working fluidly and efficiently as a team and have the support documentation to fall back on if issues do arise.

Rogelio (Roger): Last week I finished the in-game render I was working on, I think it looks really cool, I liked the lighting result that I got, It really looked the way i wanted, here at the office Dan gave me some tips on how it should be lightened. Now we’ve been working on the video for the 1.0 v, I think it will be so hilarious, we’ve started to set up props and building models for the needed scenery, I think we’ll be busy with these tasks for this week, hopefully we also will begin to animate and do render tests.

Kasper (KasperVld): I’ve started to look after many what used to be Rowsdower’s tasks, such as managing the Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and other social media outlets, and taking care of KSP-TV and the Media Group. It’s been a mountain of work that resulted in a few very early mornings and late nights, but that was to be expected. We have a contest planned for this Valentine’s day, so keep a look out for when that drops!

That's a lot of stuff for one week's work, this shit is good.

 

[Hellraiser]

It is nice to see they made thrust and Isp work as it should in regards to atmo.

 

[Drax]

That is indeed an interesting change (I didn't knew that was how it's supposed to be). Coupled with the new atmospheric and aerodynamic model it should make shit more interesting.
Oh, and kerbals with pussies, game-changer.

 

[Hellraiser]

New landing gear:

New resource overlay:

 

[Ulminati]

Hope the resource overlay gets another graphical pass or two. It's pretty fugly right now

Interesting to see that the distributions in that pic follow geographic borders though.

 

[Hellraiser]

Hope the resource overlay gets another graphical pass or two. It's pretty fugly right now

Interesting to see that the distributions in that pic follow geographic borders though.

Biome based resource rates, go figure.

 

[Hellraiser]

New/old resource parts:

Not black-ish part just below the pod is a resource tank/container, below it is a resource processor, then there's the old clam-shell dish on top of the pod and the smaller hexagonal detector attached to a girder adapter.

All new landing gear types:

Lightyear , good one porkjet. Also tiny landing gear for my tiny ion engine planes

Valentina, because :incloosive::

 

[Caim]

I thought that Squad went ape every time someone mentioned female Kerbals, but oh well.

 

[Ulminati]

They used to say Kerbals were genderless. I guess after years of incessant nagging from the SJWs they finally caved in. Oh well. It'll give me someone to blame for crashing into shit during landing/docking.

 

[Caim]

They used to say Kerbals were genderless. I guess after years of incessant nagging from the SJWs they finally caved in. Oh well. It'll give me someone to blame for crashing into shit during landing/docking.

They could have just said that adding such Kerbals would be erasure of the genderless and disregarding the culture of the Kerbals and their naming conventions.

Or just claim it's cultural imperialism by the Americans (Squad is based in Mexico after all).