Drax
Arcane
Devnote Tuesday: Fairing well
Felipe (HarvesteR): This week has been mostly focused on the new fairings, the procedural mesh generation is already up and running, and you can already place them in the editor and sculpt the fairing as you wish. The enclosure is subdivided into panels, which can break off individually or in groups, which means we can have full control over how the fairing will come apart once it’s jettisoned. During construction, you can place a fairing and build it up immediately after placement, or you can use Tweakable actions to edit it later. There are actions to delete, re-build and edit fairings at any time in the editor.
Next up is implementing the actual jettisoning behavior for the panels, and also writing in the enclosure detection, which is already being handled by the cargo bay module. There is quite a bit of work still left to be done, but I dare say what we have is looking pretty good already.
The fairings are very customizable via the part.cfg, so we can determine the number of panels, the amount (if any) of edge smoothing between panels of different angles, as well as a number of other parameters, on a per part basis. And yes, we are planning on a number of different sizes of fairing parts (at least covering 1.25m through 3.5m profiles).
Alex (aLeXmOrA): Had to download the whole project of the game to my computer again since we did some equipment changes at the office. Now that I have Unity again, I’ve been tracking some issues and I’m also going to be adding some things to the license system.
Mike (Mu): Well development has stalled a little this week as I have been as sick as a dog. In my more lucid moments I have been cracking on with the aerodynamic heating effects.
Marco (Samssonart): I kept working on the patcher some more, after a few local tests it seems to be working with a few minor problems, but I am a bit troubled by the fact that all of the mac computers I have access to have already installed Rsync, and due to it being used for other stuff I can’t uninstall it, so I asked Ted to squeeze it into QA, the guys haven’t had the time yet, busy with other stuff, but in case it doesn’t work I have already thought of a workaround, but anyway, I think it’s safe to say that you will be able to use the patcher to update to 1.0 when the time comes.
Other than that, I have started to implement those tutorials I have been discussing, right now I have reviewed everything, making changes here and there to reflect the newly implemented features that weren’t discussed in the tutorials, the only current tutorial that underwent a major overhaul is the flight one, now it’s all about getting to orbit. I will continue to work on tutorials for the rest of the week.
Daniel (danRosas): Published last week the Valentina Kerman design. Read some really cool stuff on all the social networks. Glad that you like her that much, it was months of team effort to make it right. We’re working on a new animation. I’ve been playing with the animatic, the editing and the blocking, to make something that makes sense. We are still not sure what could be changed. It’s that moment where everything looks ugly, but needs to make sense in timing and camera work.
Jim (Romfarer): This week my Engineer’s Report branch went into QA testing. As expected they found bugs with many of the tests. They also reported some issues which were rooted deeper in the code base. For example: the preflight-checks had a bug which made it possible to launch uncontrollable vessels and a bug in the staging toolbar where the backup state (the state you load when you hit ctrl z) was not set correctly. So all in all it was a good week.
Max (Maxmaps): Marketing deals, promotional deals, collaborations and all sorts of meetings galore! Add to that meetings and quick talks with the devs to monitor their fantastic progress and it’s been a very, very busy week. I’ll be throwing an AMA announcement on our subreddit and forums later regarding an exciting new partnership. Other than that, absolutely thrilled with the response and love Valentina got from you guys. KSP continues to have the coolest community out there. Also this week’s Squadcast may contain some early looks at new IVAs!
Ted (Ted): Over the past week, I’ve been working with the QA Team to test out Jim’s Engineer App. Testing on it is going well despite me managing to catch the flu over the weekend. Additionally, a couple of the QA Testers have continued the progress with the aero tweaks they’ve been eagerly working on. Hopefully we should see some good things there soon!
Rogelio (Roger): I’ve been modeling and texturing some props for the release animation, trying to keep as less shaders and uv maps as I can to have more control on the project and more important to make render testing less painful. I’ve found all the assets I needed to dress some of the scenes, and for now we’re re thinking the sequences edition to make a fluid storytelling. There are some props that aren’t modeled yet, but hopefully this week they should be done.
Kasper (KasperVld): I’ve been working from morning ‘till midnight most days of the last week, focussing on doing a few tasks that were still outstanding and a few that popped up. The most visible part of it will be that we have two new streamers for KSP-TV: NewbiusMaximus will show up Mondays 6PM-8PM EST to present his Adequate Space Adventures, and 1stGhostLive will be joining the channel as well, streaming on Monday mornings EST (exact timeslot still pending). Finally, I was very pleased to see the great response to the Valentina Kerman reveal last Friday, that was a fantastic end to our week.