KSP Weekly: The space pioneers and other adventures

Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. On a day like today, 60 years ago and just 3 weeks after the Soviet Union had launched the first man into space, NASA launched the first American human spacecraft: the Mercury-Redstone 3, piloted by astronaut Alan Shepard Jr. Shepard’s mission consisted of a 15-minute suborbital flight with the primary objective of demonstrating his ability to withstand the high G-forces of launch and atmospheric re-entry. He named his space capsule Freedom 7, setting a precedent for the remaining six Mercury astronauts naming their spacecraft. The spacecraft reached an altitude of 101.2 nautical miles (187.5 kilometers) and traveled a downrange distance of 263.1 nautical miles (487.3 kilometers). A few years later, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 mission, piloting the Apollo Lunar Module Antares to the most accurate landing of the Apollo missions. At age 47, he became the fifth and oldest person to walk on the Moon, and the only one of the Mercury Seven astronauts to do so. During the mission, he hit two golf balls on the lunar surface. Here at the KSP HQ we are constantly inspired by the legacy of the brave men and women who pioneered space travel, such as the legendary Alan Shepard. But you didn’t come here to learn about history or read motivational texts, so let’s start with this new issue about the latest developments of KSP.



Let’s begin with the developments of the upcoming 1.3 Update. The past week, although it was a little bit shorter for some of us due to the May holidays was spent testing more localization changes, improvements, and the newest fixes for the core game. For example, we adjusted the internal camera system to solve an issue with a green colored line appearing over the ocean, which we’re sure will be welcomed. Similarly, some time was spent addressing some long standing issues with shadows and we were able to solve the old shadow issue in the KSC scene for buildings. The devs also fixed a problem with the maneuver nodes and patched conics where the maneuver node would jump to an invalid location on the screen when a vessel was burning it’s engines past a node and the projected conics encountered another bodies SOI. Investigations into a few of the other, and most difficult to reproduce bugs, have also been drawn into focus, but still need time and effort to pin down completely for dev attention.

Some of the devs tested some mods, so we can assure that they’ll work properly with the new additions coming to 1.3, as well as to nicely document all of the api changes and new features. Check out the modders Notes for 1.2.9, that have been posted on the KSP Pre-release subforum, we’re sure there’s very useful information for you modders there.

And to wrap up the news about localization, the work on the KSPedia and localized textures continues with the help of the dedicated group of volunteers who have been helping us to ensure the proper translation of all the terminology within the game.

In other news, Console testing continues with each new build bringing promising results too.

As we mentioned in a past issue of KSP Weekly, we have been working together with Blitworks on improving the game’s control scheme for consoles and one good example we mentioned are the maneuver nodes controls in the orbital view, which now can be easily adjusted with the following control scheme:

PS4

Prograde/Retrograde = Press LS + Up or Down



Normal/Anti-normal = Press LS + L1 + Up or Down



Radial In/Radial Out = Press LS + R1 + Up or Down



Move maneuver = Press LS + L1 + R1 + Up or Down



XB1

Prograde/Retrograde = Press LS + Up or Down



Normal/Anti-normal = Press LS + LB + Up or Down



Radial In/Radial Out = Press LS + RB + Up or Down



Move maneuver = Press LS + LB + RB + Up or Down



We have some visuals for you to see how it works too (see, no cursor)!

There was some progress in the development of the Making History expansion as well. On one hand the work on defining the expansion’s stories and tasks is moving forward, coupled with the Expansion’s iterative development.

Furthermore, there’s been some work on some minor tasks and adjustments for the new expansion, including several code reviews on the expansion system as well as polishing the saving mechanism to list and persist expansions in the ExpansionBuildWindow. We also refactored code to support bundle name hashing instead of pure bundle hashes and added support to generate and modify content for ScriptableObject during editor runtime.

In addition to all the technical work mentioned above, the expansion parts have been getting more QA feedback and testing, including getting part failures working with edge cases such as when vessels are unloaded. Devs also worked on getting the calls to expansion code to fail gracefully when the expansion isn’t installed.

And on the parts subject, we have another surprise for you. The team was able to get more work done on our American engines, and also wrapped up some finishing touches on a new 2.5m Apollo-inspired capsule. Check it out!

Our artists have also been working on the expansion’s UI, which is looking great and hopefully we’ll be able to give you a sneak peak soon.

Finally, we encourage you to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - Landing like Elon does! This time around the challenge consists of orbiting and landing under rocket power only without lander legs or any mods. Are you up to the challenge? Check it out and share your creations!

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!

