KSP Weekly: A short briefing

Welcome to KSP Weekly, everyone! This week we have not only seen a big leap forward in the various projects we’re working on, but we’ve also been struck by luck and given a double load of astronomical events with a penumbral lunar eclipse and comet 45P dashing past some 11.9 million kilometers above Earth. We’re all space enthusiasts and such events get us excited, we hope you can catch them both. But we’re here to talk about everything Kerbal, so without further ado, let’s begin.



This week’s edition will be a bit short, since a great deal of the work we’ve done is related to a project you’ll learn about soon. Despite that there are many other things that kept us busy this week.

The QA team has been busy, as you would expect: testing, testing, and testing again until something breaks. Hearts, minds, PCs… oh and of course world firsts. We do this to ensure that the final product comes out in the best shape it can possibly be. And even though some of our colleagues have the KSPedia burned into their retinas by now, QA is one of the pillars of development and it is essential when releasing any game. We would also like welcome our new localization volunteers this week, and they will be joining the hard working checking and correcting team. Thank you!

And talking about broken hearts and PCs…this week sal_vager shared this little poem with us. Why? I wonder…

House has old wiring Boom goes my PC But continuing testing Reading KSPedia by VNC

On the development front activities included spreadsheets, spreadsheets and even more spreadsheets! Checking and finding the strings that need to be translated is a long and not so fun task. In between that it’s been mostly code reviews, bug fixing and KSPedia updates with more of the same planned in the next week.

Programmers also had fun tweaking UIs to make the languages fit. Pop Quiz: Which Language seems to take up the most room? Answer: Spanish.

There was also some bug fixing here and there including some bugs related to the Flagpole (outside the Astronaut Complex) destruction/upgrades and interactions with the Astronaut Complex. They also fixed a bug related to the Ablator darkening on heat shields. The heat shields do not darken correctly or persist correct in 1.2.2, but now they are fixed! More work on the Runway seam upgrades/fixes, they are coming along and the T3 Runway is complete. Just the T2 Runway to go. Investigations continue on the terrain seams but we have made some progress. We want to give special thanks to swjr-swis, klgraham1013, and KroShan for submitting the saves. All of the saves are helping us figure out what the problem is and will give us lots of places to test the fixes.

But that’s not all, Roy has been working on the Kerbal name generator: the English, Spanish, Russian and Japanese versions are coming along nicely, but he is still having some troubles with the Chinese version. The volunteers have been extremely helpful with their insight for this task, too.

Refactoring in the Localization branch using the Lingoona grammar continues: plural/singular tokens, numeric parameters. We’ve also fixed non-Localizable strings containing tags like bold, color (in general font style) and tested across several languages.

In other news, our friends at Blitworks keep on working on the console update. We’ve already started to test the first builds, there is still some fixing and polishing to do, but it is looking good.

Finally our artists keep working on the retopology of some animation models, as well as fixing KSPedia issues and finishing the Russian version of the KSPedia. Who’d guess that adapting characters would be so complicated.

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!

