KSP Weekly: Per aspera ad astra

Welcome to KSP Weekly, everyone! Today and tomorrow are marked by the anniversaries of two tragedies within the aerospace history: these being the Apollo I and the Challenger Shuttle disasters, respectively. Both shocked the world and generated doubt and fear about the place of humankind among the stars. These were not, nor will be the last missteps of our way towards the firmament, but we have persevered and the ultimate sacrifice of these brave heroes is a testament of our will to reach for greatness, despite of the hardships the road may lay ahead of us. This idea is beautifully summarized in a latin phrase most of you have probably seen: “Per aspera ad astra” or in other words, “through hardships to the stars”. Let’s never be discouraged of our goals and let us always reach for the stars. But we’re here to talk about everything Kerbal, so without further ado, let’s begin.



QA team this week has been at work, as localization support continues to be tested, reviewed, and revised where necessary. Testing has focused on a few things in this area, particularly keyboard layouts and testing of the elements that were complete but were awaiting feedback. We have been looking for overflowing text fields, kerning/spacing issues, missing text, layout errors, that sort of thing, as well as spotting and reporting other UI bugs. We’d like to give a special shoutout to our team of language volunteers who are doing a great job with correcting errors, ensuring that the unique and subtle kerbal humor is preserved. Bug fixes throughout the game have continued (this week we looked at science transmissions), with special emphasis placed on those relevant to localizations.

Our dear colleague, sal_vager wrote this poem to express his sentiment for the tasks he’s been involved with lately:

Testing keyboqrd lqyouts Qlzqys forget to szitch Hqve to pqy qttention So I donùt type like this1

We’ve had so many people volunteering for Chinese localization testing that poor JPLRepo’s inbox has been overwhelmed. Unfortunately, JPLRepo can’t reply to them all, but we’d like to thank all those that volunteered to help. We now have more than enough people to help with the Chinese localization. Now, just as we were looking for Chinese speakers before, we are looking for Russian natives who are willing to lend us a hand to ensure the quality of the localization. If you are interested, please contact us at info@kerbalspaceprogram.com with the subject “Russian Localization Help”.

On the development front, the team has mainly been focused on localization and what comes after that, but they’ve also spent some time in between to fix a few known bugs. Most notably: the priority of Science Containers has been changed so that they move science from experiments before other Science Containers. Similarly, the MPL Science Lab was changed so that it now only functions with scientists on board (it is currently working even if you have just a tourist inside!). We also encountered an issue where the .cfg files were getting loaded in different states of the game. Gladly it was sorted out! For localization the UI bugs are piling up as we face the challenge of different text and languages fitting into the KSP User Interface.

In other respects, the Loud and Clear update for consoles is coming along nicely. Our friends from Blitworks are doing a fantastic job. This update will include many improvements we’re sure console players will enjoy.

The art team has been working on localizations too, notably on Japanese and Simplified Chinese, as we showed you in a previous edition of KSP Weekly. We are checking every part of the game, including KSPedia, for which Japanese translation is complete and Chinese conversion is ongoing.

We also want to take this opportunity to introduce you to the newest member of the ever growing KSP team, our new PR Manager, Artemisa, who borrowed her nickname from the Greek mythology goddess, has almost ten years of experience working primarily in videogames press, in websites and in print magazines. And in the last few years, Digital Marketing has given her extra work. When she is not playing video games, you will find her watching movies or tv series or eating tacos. Some of her favorite videogames series include Metal Gear Solid, The Legend of Zelda and Persona. Welcome to the team Artemisa!

Finally we are very happy about how the Kerbal Spice Program contest is coming out. We received really cool and impressive entries and now it’s time to vote for your favorite. Click here to vote!

The winner will be announced on Monday, January 31st. Good luck to all participants!

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!

Happy launchings!

