KSP Weekly: A Titan’s flyby and making history!

Welcome to KSP Weekly, everyone. Today, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will make its last flight near Saturn’s moon, Titan, which is the mission’s last opportunity to closely observe the lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons which extend throughout the northern polar region of the satellite and the final opportunity to use its powerful radar to pass through the mist and take detailed images of the lunar surface. According to NASA, the closest approach to Titan is scheduled for 11:08 pm PDT, today. During its flyby, Cassini will pass 979 kilometers (608 miles) from Titan’s surface at a speed of 21,000 kilometers per hour. This overflight also means the beginning to Cassini’s Grand Finale, a final set of 22 orbits between the planet and its rings, ending with a dive into Saturn on September 15th that will end the mission. But we’re here to talk about everything Kerbal and this week was full of advancements, so let’s switch to the topic you came here to read about.



Localization work continues and the relentless bughunt is bearing its fruits. The work is currently more structure related while the volunteers are in their element making suggestions on grammar and layout to refine the text. We’re working with them to ease some of their burdens by doing some language testing and improving in-game debug tools. The first pass of translation for the prerelease is almost complete now, so the teams are looking in the game to make sure the translations actually fit the context. The number of accidental English words that we are encountering in the non-English versions of the game drops by a huge fraction every week! We now have the time and the experience to look at improving the processes involved with localization.

There are other things being done for the final release of 1.3. We’ve localized and prepared Asteroid Day for integration to the release and will be getting the test team onto a balance pass for its contracts soon. Devs also spent some time localizing and fixing some bugs in the Part Upgrade functionality such as applying upgrade node costs correctly. Part Upgrades will now show all stats updates in the SPH/VAB and TechTree. We’ve also focused on polishing the final details for the Russian and Spanish contracts, as well as making sure that the kerbal Names in Japanese look like actual names. Similarly, we worked on fixing some textures that needed some corrections in every language.

Blitworks continues at a very rapid pace with the console builds and our testers are throwing everything at them with rigorous testing. There are important improvements in the control schemes, UI, and general gameplay that are all in focus while we test the achievement progress system on each platform. Save integrity continues to be at the forefront of our minds, and thankfully there’s nothing to report on this matter.

Let’s move on to Making History advancements, where we have not only been very busy on an Architecture/Design level, we’ve also been working on several tasks for the upcoming expansion. Defining base behaviour and structure of the UI and connecting it with the core code. So you could say that there’s been lots of code reviews and reviewing design as we continue our agile delivery. In addition, we continue to work on the ExpansionSystem, fleshing out the bundle pipeline, the developers interaction with it and how that feeds through the magical Jenkins system. This coupled with some work on testing how to get the game to work nicely with the same code base whether or not the expansion is installed. Something that is easy to say but not so easy to do. Luckily for us, we have a very talented development team that is working through all of these tough challenges.

The artists on the other hand continue modeling IVAs and this week they also finished up our new Vostok-inspired model, as well as wrapping up a few last details on the model for our first American-inspired engine. This Vostok-inspired model includes a blend of existing as well as new parts. And since folks will ask - those are separate 0.38m monopropellant tanks you see attached at the base of our Vostok 1 replica!

In conjunction with the new parts, the QA team embrace the task of testing them. This work brings currently known issues that had been deferred into focus. Without getting into too much detail, some of the existing bugs that have already been reported but were unable to be fixed efficiently, are now being thoroughly researched because of the potential impact on the expansion. This of course brings benefits to KSP as a whole.

Finally, we encourage you to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - Have you found a green monolith yet? Share your encounters with these rare easter eggs with the whole community!

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!

