KSP Weekly: The art of making missions

Welcome to KSP Weekly, everyone. While looking at our calendar for upcoming important dates, we realized that next week it will have been 56 years since soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin completed the first manned space flight, orbiting the Earth in 108 minutes, as well as 36 years since shuttle Columbia became the first winged spaceship to orbit Earth and return to an airport landing. Both of these historical events happened on April 12, only 20 years apart from each other and just a week later we’ll witness the final chapter of Cassini’s remarkable story, which has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004 and will begin its dive into Saturn’s atmosphere on April 26. It is amazing what we can achieve when we set up our minds to do something great and certainly gives us some hope despite our otherwise sometimes “messy” behavior as a species, but I digress. We’re here to talk about everything Kerbal and this week wasn’t anything short of exciting. We keep moving forward with Making History and the upcoming update for our console ports, so without further ado, let’s dive in.



A couple of weeks ago we spoke a bit about what constitutes a Mission in the upcoming expansion. Today we want to go into a bit more detail about how a Mission is created.

At its core the Mission Builder takes its inspiration from Visual Scripting methodology. Using the Mission Builder, players will lay out their missions graphically rather than using a system where they type out lines of code. This of course makes the system accessible to a wider section of the community and of course means more awesome content for all!

As mentioned, each Mission will comprise of Objectives (nodes), but there will also be other types of Nodes that can be placed down to flesh out and expand your mission. One of these other Nodes types are what we are calling Constraint Nodes. Constraint Nodes will provide rules for players of your Missions. Things like Must use or Can’t use part x, or Complete this Objective in under x Days (in Game Time). There are many more of these, and we’re working hard on generating a big list for you guys to use - as usual we will share more of these with you all in the coming weeks.

There is much more to this and we’re looking forward to share more information with you all over the coming weeks. It also goes without saying that we are extremely excited to see the sorts of Missions that the Community will produce.

But now lets move towards the QA department, where localization testing is getting down to the fine detail now, and the last few strings and translations that were either eluding us, or needed code logic adjusted before they were applied are in the process of being done. The volunteer language specialists continue to impress with the dedication they are showing. A few non localization bugs have been uncovered during testing translations, and because of translations. These have been quickly dispatched by the development team. Console testing continues, and the build frequency is really ramping up with both platforms being brought into sync now. More Mission Builder part testing, and sample craft building and evaluation has also been going on while the developers work on getting the interface and backend code consolidated. The guys at Blitworks are eager to take on any input about UI and control issues from the QA Team.

Correspondingly, our friends at Blitworks have helped us develop a new maneuver node control scheme, which according to our testers greatly improves upon the previous one, which were adjusted using the cursor mode, in contrast with the newer scheme that uses the joysticks in combination with the Left and Right Shoulder Buttons for more precise and easier maneuver node adjustments.

In other regards, the development team has been hard at work with the Making History Expansion.

For example, JPLRepo spent time finishing off development of a new Vessel and Part ID system that modders will also be able to leverage and provides persistent IDs for all Vessels and Parts for their entire lifecycle. This is core expansions functionality that will allow missions to do all kinds of crazy stuff.

Similarly, devs have been working on basic graphics for the expansion. Nodes that you can place and drag around, lines to connect the nodes, and some little elements that you can place inside the nodes to make them exciting. As well as working on its core/base UI and implementing the first bits of the expansion logic within the UI, while also coding functionalities for some of the new capabilities that will be available for missions.

But that’s not all, the devs were able to deliver this week the first version of the Expansion System, which includes an Expansion Builder tool for the devs and uses a stock version of the Asset Bundle Manager unity package. We also automated a process to rebuild and clean expansions and exposed development options, something which will be very helpful during this development phase to facilitate the work among all the development team.

Naturally there was some bug squashing and cleaning of the bug tracker for the Localization branch. This week alone, more than a dozen of them were resolved and the works will continue until we’ve dealt with all of them. One example was that in some languages the text did not fit on the current size of some windows and as smaller text is not an option, we will have bigger windows for those particular cases!

The art department has also been busy with the expansion either working on some of the new American-inspired parts, tweaking specular maps and playing Tetris with UV layouts. Time was also spent on developing the wireframes and user flow for the UI of the Mission Builder, which is in itself an exercise on clarity. We will start implementing them into the game for their first test pass. Our artists have also started to work on making new IVAs to be included in new parts for the expansion. And just like the rest of the team they had some localization tasks, as well, fixing localized textures and working on the KSPedia, which continues to improved thanks to the dedicated team of volunteers helping us out with this process. Volunteers, we salute you!



Finally, we encourage you, creative KSP players to show off your best space stations on our latest KSP Challenge thread - Space Station Week!, click here to learn more.

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!

