KSP Weekly: Remembering Gagarin

Welcome to KSP Weekly, everyone! Yesterday, March 9th was the 83rd anniversary of Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin’s birth. Here at the KSP HQ, Gagarin is a major inspiration, he was not only the very first human to journey into outer space, but he was a very passionate, good willed human being from humble origins that strived to become a pilot and through his determination achieved his dream and beyond. He was widely known for his smile and his kind nature, and although he died at a young age (34), his legacy lives on. Right before he embarked on Vostok I, he said the following:



“Dear friends, acquaintances and strangers, my dear compatriots and all of humanity, in the next few brief minutes a spacecraft may take me into the outer space of the universe.

What can I say during these last few minutes before I start? All my life comes before me in this unique and beautiful moment.

Everything I did and lived has been for this.”

But we’re here to talk about everything Kerbal, so without further ado, let’s begin.

This week has been a particularly busy one with the upcoming pre-release of the localization pack, there’s been a lot of testing, fixing, polishing and refactoring, but things are coming along nicely. We are really getting down to the fine details now, and every twist and turn is a new and exciting adventure. That said, we are now feeling confident that we can release a build to the Experimentals team that is worthy of their time and effort on Monday. We need to “dot the tees, and cross the eyes” between now and then, and certainly things are looking more complete. Some new (but old) bugs have also come to the light during this phase of testing, and those are getting attention, too. It’s only when looking at other things in minute detail do these things become so very apparent. Everyone on the QA team from language specialist to core staff have been working every hour to make sure the developers know which are the areas of concern and interest. Special mention again goes to the language specialist volunteers for their dedication, persistence and efforts. They really are some special people. The Devs are special too, and have patiently dealt with everything that has been thrown back at them. So thanks to all the people playing Spreadsheet Simulator 2017, your work is appreciated, and useful!

On other testing news, the console builds have been thoroughly tested and for example, on PS4, there are advancements on the save game corruption issue, the team has been putting it to the test and it seems to be working alright. The team are still throwing everything at trying to break the game on your behalf armed with the great feedback that has been given by the community. Things are looking much better, but there’s still much more work to be done to make things perfect however. For example, the VAB tools and part rotation aren’t accessible yet, so if the QA team wants parts at an angle, they have to add a part with sloped sides then surface attach to it, which reminds us of the tricks we had to pull before 0.15.

On the bugtracker, the QA team has been chasing along behind Bewing and confirming bugs that nobody else would have gotten. Playing KSP with one finger over the screenshot key is beginning to remind Technicalfool of the old drop-the-ruler game.

As expected devs have at full throttle with localization, as well. And some of them are even dreaming with the string “#autoLOC_XXXXX_Assets” - which is “interesting”. But there’s been also some bug squashing, for example the terrain seam fixes continue and hopefully we’ll have all of the kinks worked out of the PQS system by the time that we ship!

Furthermore, we do have two “additions” for 1.3 pretty close to done from spare time fiddling, which might be inserted throughout the pre-release:

Ambient Light Adjustment: A common request from the media group is to adjust the settings for Ambient light values. For 1.3 we have added a Boost value to the ambient light setting (similar to the highlighter boost slider). This one brightens the render engine settings to bring light into the darkness



A common request from the media group is to adjust the settings for Ambient light values. For 1.3 we have added a Boost value to the ambient light setting (similar to the highlighter boost slider). This one brightens the render engine settings to bring light into the darkness Asteroid Redirect Mod:Yes this is not a new thing, but this will finally be merged to the base game to add that extra facet to contract gameplay without needing an extra download - including the SENTINEL Infrared Telescope, the final art to make the main game.



We have something else to share with you about the console update, as we’ve said in previous editions, there’s been much progress and the guys at Blitworks have even improved several aspects of the UI to avoid using the cursor as much as in the current versions, one of these improvements is the addition of radial menus, which actually make the console KSP experience much smoother.

The art department is also very busy helping us out with really cool content that we’ll be able to show you soon. One involves a very large nebula image, which according to Leticia is very relaxing to paint.

Finally, we are very happy to see how many of you are sending us articles to participate on the Kerbal Chronicles Contest, remember that the last day to submit your entries is on Monday, March 13th, so if you haven’t and want win some the best prizes we have given yet, you can submit an article here.

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!