Devnote Tuesdays: The Greener Pastures Edition

Anthony (Rowsdower): Looks like we’re at the end of the road, fellas. My time as your community manager has almost reached its conclusion. At the end of our business day on Friday, I will no longer be part of the KSP team. No, there was no drama. No beef was had and I certainly did not fly down to the office to challenge anyone to a lucha match. I made a difficult decision in order to follow a sudden opportunity that arose closer to where I’m based. Yes, I’m declaring myself for this year’s NFL Draft…ok that last part’s not true, but that first part is.

I am extremely proud to have been your community manager. There is no other community out there in gaming quite like the KSP community. Your intelligence, creativity, passion and willingness to help others is rivaled by no one. Judging by how the game has progressed, your commitment to excellence and ability to keep the team on their toes is a testament to why having a community and maintaining a back and forth conversation with your fanbase is more important than ever. In short, you rock! Never change.

I must also give our forum mods, our media team, everyone at KSP-TV and last but not least, all you modders out there all the props I can. To do do what you do and work as hard as you can at it, just for the pure joy of it all is more heartwarming than anything. Your work helps drive KSP farther every single day and everyone at Squad is well appreciative of your efforts.

Finally, to everyone at Squad, it’s been an absolute honor to work with you. You all have been nothing but excellent to me since the very first day I arrived. I’m no developer, but my opinion mattered. When it came to things more in my wheelhouse, you trusted my judgements. For both, I’ll always be grateful.

I’m going to miss being around everyone and I’m going to also miss being “That KSP Guy” among the people I meet out here, but life goes on. Thanks for listening and good luck to whoever comes next.

Felipe (HarvesteR): Last week, the new drag and lift models got integrated, and early testing has started on that. Early feedback sounds very good so far, and based on my own subjective experience, flying does feel a lot better now. We’re far from done though, as with the new changes, new possibilities arise and must be accounted for. Cargo bays haven’t had much of a use until now, but with the new aero system, they will shield whatever is inside them from the airstream. This means more than reduced drag and reentry heat though. Wing surfaces placed inside (closed) bays won’t function, neither will parachutes, RCS blocks, solar panels, air intakes or science experiments which must be performed in an atmosphere. To get those to work again, you will have to open the bays first. These parts which were mostly just for show so far should now become a much more important (and useful) consideration when building.

Alex (aLeXmOrA): Still working on the KerbalEdu License system tweaks I have to do. Trying some programming languages I’m not familiar to, so I can make it work better and smoother. Also, I’m helping with other Squad projects (web development side).

Mike (Mu): It’s been a week of fixing bugs and expanding the drag system. Some great responses/feedback from the QA team about it all. The design for re-entry and mach effects is coming along nicely too but my main focus has been performance and stability of the drag systems.

Marco (Samssonart): The KSP new demo is starting to take shape, now basically all of the sandbox restrictions are set, as for the restrictions that affect all play modes the only one I’m missing is having limited concurrent flights. The next step, which is arguably the most time consuming will be to create the new career mode demo, this is harder than sandbox because the current demo already has a sandbox implementation, but career will have to be done from scratch.

Daniel (danRosas): Been working on the final touches of the upgraded rig for the animations. Shoulders are moving a bit funky, but nothing grave. Should be fixed with a couple of constraints. Imported into the game two new buildings for revision, in order to bounce back comments to Nick. Same thing with the female version of the Kerbals, needs to be approved inside the engine, to move forward with the implementation. On the other hand, we’re considering making some adjustments to the production schedule for the buildings, in order to give them more priority for now.

Jim (Romfarer): This week i’ve finally gotten around to adding more of the planned design concern tests to the Engineer’s Report. Weeks ago i was getting real concerned that the tests were too heavy on the cpu, so i had to apply some re-factoring on the algorithms and now, with half the tests implemented, it looks like a non-concern.

Max (Maxmaps): This week’s been all about working closely with our collaborators to make sure their parts of the update are delivered in time. Aerodynamics is now in QA and the Refueling system will be soon to follow. I’ve also been neck deep in business meetings regarding the general running of our Studio and planning for the future.

Ted (Ted): In the past week the QA Team and I have got cracking with testing the major components of the aerodynamics overhaul. As is custom in QA it’s been a bit bumpy to start off with, but the progress that is being made is phenomenal and the bugs are dropping like.. well.. winged bugs that are no longer flying.

Additionally, I’ve been working closely with RoverDude and Arsonide to support the development of their respective features for the next update. Things are looking great on their end and some of you may already have caught a glimpse of the Resource implementation thus far in last week’s Squadcast.

Rogelio (Roger): Last week I told you about doing an image that will appear in game, I’ve been playing around with some ideas, and modeling some assets to make the image composition. The new spacesuit is already modeled and textured, now Dan is rigging it, we’ll show it as soon as it’s finished.

Kasper (KasperVld): I got a lot done in all sorts of areas over the last seven days: small maintenance on the forums, contacting Youtubers and Twitch streamers, making arrangements to get a few new moderators who speak specific languages involved on the forums and the list goes on. As you may have read in Anthony’s blob, he will be leaving us after this week and I’ve worked closely with him to make sure things go as smoothly as possible until we can get a new CM drilled in the routines. Until such time, I’ll be taking over control of the social media channels and serve as the point of contact between you and Squad. Feel free to message me about anything you would normally contact Rowsdower for.