Devnote Tuesdays: The 0.24 Experimentals Edition

Felipe (HarvesteR): Business and design meetings are very much still KSP-related work, but they make for really poor dev blog entries… I did manage to get a few usability tweaks implemented last week, and this week I’m now fully focusing on getting the Contracts system working. This turned out to be one gigantic system, which obviously means it took much longer than expected, but it also means that we have a very powerful, expandable, mod-friendly system that we can use to generate all sorts of interesting contracts. With such a large system, we aren’t shooting to have it fully completed in this update, but rather to have the underlying framework for it working to its best capability, so we (and the modders) can get creative with it later on and make the most of it. In terms of code complexity, the Contracts Framework is likely the new most complex single feature we’ve got. There is still quite a ways to go with it though, but on the 0.24 release it should be at least a good showcase of its potential already.

Alex (aLeXmOrA): An instance of the new version of vBulletin 5.1.0 is been fully tested, so we can be totally sure the KSP Forums upgrade will work perfectly. I set the website page and image announcement in SpacePort Site for our move to Curse. Right now, I’m doing research and reading some documentation about something Bob, Lalo and I will be setting (can’t talk too much about it, you’ll have news later).

Mike (Mu): We’re entering experimentals for 0.24 after spending the past few weeks testing and refining the back end design for contract systems. Also been experimenting with some new shaders for the planets. These however will not make the cut for 0.24.

Daniel (danRosas): last week I spend a couple of days at CreativaFest, and got to see some conferences by some extremely talented guys. All about animation, or animation production, I think we were some of the few video game centered speeches. Also, it was fun to see only 4 dudes in the room had already played (or knew about) KSP. I guess there are not a lot of players around Mexico City. On the other hand, I finished a first draft of the new animatic, and started joint weighting on the new model that Roger did last week.

Jim (Romfarer): I’m in the middle of adding my own mods to the new gui systems I’ve created. This has made me consider re-writing some of the code to make it easier to use, or rather it gave me a wider perspective on it, and there will be some modifications made during the experimentals phase.

Miguel (Maxmaps): Engaging different sectors of the community on the move to Curse.com, knew the road would be rocky but I truly believe this will be a net positive and am willing to keep at it.

Bob (Calisker): Spending some time with the community moderators and talking about our move to Curse.com for our official modding community website. We think this is going to be a great improvement from SpacePort and hope everybody gives it a try and shares feedback after using it so we can work with Curse to make sure our modders and players are getting what they need from this new resource.

Ted (Ted): Finishing up the QA on Contracts, with Experimentals being so close I can smell them. Though that may be an overheating GPU…



Anthony (Rowsdower): This.



Eduardo (Lalo): Following up some administrative arrangements

Rogelio (Roger): Last week Daniel and me went to creativa fest, an animation and videogames festival in mexico city where we saw disney, dreamworks and nickelodeon animation directors and producers. This week I’ve just finished the new model for cinematics, and today I started to model an environment for the next cinematic.