KSP Weekly: New beginnings, new opportunities…

Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. Earlier this week we shared the news of our involvement with Take-Two Interactive, publishers of great and highly acclaimed franchises, such as BioShock, Borderlands, Civilization, XCOM, and now, welcoming Kerbal Space Program to their family. This is fantastic news and a huge opportunity for KSP. Take-Two has reiterated their respect towards the game and its community, their commitment to keep an open dialogue, as well as their appreciation of the creative talent of its collaborators and teams. In a nutshell, the current KSP development team will continue to work on KSP and the upcoming content – this doesn’t change much for us, besides getting the best tools and Take-Two’s full support to realize our vision with the highest quality standards – which is great for everybody and, naturally, fills us with excitement! But you are here to read about KSP development, so let’s begin.

This week we have had time to really dig into the post release tasks that we always do. Keeping up with the feedback, bugs and comments from our community, helping modders with their questions to get mods working and how to help our modding community with localization as that’s the point of 1.3.

We also want to reassure our players that the work on the updated console version continues. Together with Blitworks and Take-Two’s production team who are now helping us out, we will deliver a console port of the highest quality. We’ll have more to share on that as development continues.

Now let’s move on to the development advancements of the Making History expansion. This week we were deeply involved with work on the expansion´s UI and features. It’s looking promising and we’re very happy with the new code and implementation of the action pane (an area of the screen dedicated to allowing the mission creator the ability to modify settings for mission Nodes). It works great and has a lot of potential for modding. We’re also nearly done with the mission briefing dialog UI and logic. Similarly, persistence for each Mission’s properties, such as the mission flag, mission title and description are all working correctly and the ability to add search/sorting tags for Missions is almost in place.

On an art level, the UI design tasks keep on going and each day we are defining more and more elements. We are also starting to design a gizmo for the placeable items and creating texture maps for different props (buttons, bags…) to be used in the newest IVAs. This week we don’t have any new parts to show, but don’t despair, more are coming soon.

Now, returning to this week’s big news, here are some of the thoughts some of the devs have regarding this new KSP age:

“It’s great to be able to share the news about the Take-Two acquisition of our favorite green men and women, and looking forward to the opportunities this opens for them… and us too.” - TriggerAu

“Just as the rest of the team, I am very excited to be working along with such an experienced company as Take-Two, they have been great and have shown passionate interest in the game. I’m sure that together we will be able to deliver something the community will gladly enjoy!” - Roy

“I’m also incredibly excited about the Take-Two deal. I was lucky enough to be a part of the presentation in NYC, and I was really impressed with the team at Take-Two, their passion for KSP, and their respect for the community and for the game. I for one am absolutely confident that this partnership will be a great opportunity, and that the Kerbals we all know and love are in good hands. I’m looking forward to continuing work with Squad and Take-Two for a very long time.” - Roverdude

“Super excited for the Take-Two Interactive deal and the future for both us, Squad, Take-Two, KSP and all its die-hard fans.” - JPLRepo

Finally, we encourage you to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - Build and Fly an Mk2.5 Space Shuttle. On this occasion the challenge will include the use of two recently brought-back mods: ‘The Mk 2.5 Space Plane Parts’ and ‘Munar Industries - Modular Fuel Tank Expansion’. Participants have to build a shuttle/winged orbiter or SSTO which carries Kerbals to orbit and back and is capable of a horizontal landing. The orbiter must be lifted into space by a Launch System that decouples or un-docks once expended, allowing the Orbiter to land entirely under its own power. Participants will also get two special badges to show off their achievements! Are you up to the challenge? Check it out and share your creations!

Oh, there’s a bonus: @avera9ejoe made this 8k wallpaper over the weekend and he wanted to share it with the community, maybe some of you with multi-monitor displays will have good use for it. Click here to check it out. And if you are left with a hunger for more great wallpapers, check out this thread.

That’s it for this week. Be sure to join us on our official forums, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Stay tuned for more exciting and upcoming news and development updates!

Happy launchings!