The Story of KSP – KSP 0.1

Sorry about the delay, what was supposed to have been a nice, normal work week turned into a mad crunch here.

Anyhow, continuing with our “KSP Legacy Tour”, I give you version 0.1:

In this one, we already had a few placeholder models in place, and a placeholder terrain as well. At this point here, there was no rocket construction yet. This rocket was assembled in the game scene, to test the part mechanics and code.

Also, the game was supposed to be 2D back then. Well, the idea was that the game world and assets would be 3D, but flight would be locked down to the horizontal and vertical.

It was around this time then, that we added in the first version of the VAB:

Note that the background terrain here is very much the same as the screenshots above. That is because this is the same scene. Instead of having separate scenes for the VAB and for flight, we first tried to build it all in a single scene that had these two modes. Needless to say, it was a nightmare of spaghetti code and poor practices and we were chasing bugs for days.

This VAB-mode also had the first implementation of a user-controlled camera. You could rotate it around the building area, and pan it up and down, and that was about it.

One of the weirder things about these versions is that, while the VAB camera was able to move in 3D, construction was limited to the same 2D plane the game was meant to be locked to.

Now, before you start thinking the terrain back then looked better than what we have now, here’s why:

Here you can see what happens. The terrain was nothing but a flat plane, set into a somewhat larger plane of water. If you flew too far to either side, you’d miss the ground coming back and never stop falling.

It was about time then, that we started worrying about making a round world to orbit around.

But that’s a story for another version, and another post ;)

Cheers