KSP Weekly: Volunteers Wanted!

Welcome to KSP Weekly, everyone! In this edition, we straighten out the status of the project we have been working on lately, the progress of the localization process and some details about what the art department has been busy with this week. Now without further ado, let’s begin!



Let us begin with the development stuff: We are working on a number of streams including Bug-Fixing, Localization and releases after that. We haven’t said much about the latter yet because development is still in the very early stages and we don’t want to fall short on our promises to the community. We’ll release details as things get further along in the cycle and are closer to their end states. That is the reason why the last few KSP Weeklies have been short, simply because most of us are working on this epic (a set of different features in scrum slang) which is still in the early phases, but it is going at full swing.

In other news, work on localization is proving to be quite interesting. Keyboards are quirky and need special handling. Testing of languages may seem strange to some, but not all text is equal. Certain elements of KSP have been designed to fit around the English language. For example, when another language is used it may require much more space than originally allowed for. We don’t necessarily need to understand what the words say to spot layout issues. We have a team of volunteers within QA, who have mainly come from the community and are busy working through the translations and checking that they make sense from a KSP perspective.

We do however require some additional assistance from you, the KSP community, for a few more volunteers (many hands make light work) that we need for a couple of the languages. If you speak/read/write Japanese or Chinese-Simplified fluently and are willing to volunteer a bit of your time to make KSP great in these languages then please drop our QA Manager (@JPLRepo) a PM on the forums.

Here are some examples of the work we’ve been doing. The images are in Chinese and Japanese, but take into account that this is still a work-in-progress so not all of the text localization is complete. Take a look into the details of the textures, this will give you an idea of the meticulousness of the work we’re doing:

The Loud and Clear update for consoles is also going really well. We’ve been looking into UI and control scheme improvements, which are looking great!



The art department has been busy preparing some assets for the big release, as well as fixing some issues with the localized images and doing the retopology of a Kerbal for cinematic videos. For those who don’t know what retopology is, it is a modeling process, which helps by laying down a low-polygon mesh over the top of the high density models. This allows artists to model in a more organic and natural way, and then lay a mesh over the top of it that has a lower polygon count. The purpose of this is to have better animations for cinematics in the feature.

Finally, would you like to get the chance to win this Kerbal IVA Bundle, courtesy of Shapeways?

Stay tuned to all our Social Media channels to learn more, we’ll give more details next week!



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!

