KSP Weekly: We’re turning into polyglots!

Welcome to KSP Weekly, everyone! It’s been an exciting week, there’s been progress in all fronts and things are starting to take shape, so without further ado, let’s begin,



On the QA front testing for the localization pack continues, specifically for the KSPedia, fonts and keyboards layouts. For example, one of the challenges we’ve faced is due to changes to some of the structures that we use to accommodate the different languages, which has meant that more bugs have also been created. However, we’ve been watching out for those as well as checking the other fixes as the Dev’s deliver them.

Our Localization volunteers continue to astound and are doing a great job. We’re firing up the latest QA builds every day to see more and more stuff coming online and beginning to work. Given the only thing they have to work with is quite boring-looking spreadsheets and markup, we all here at the KSP HQ want to give them a public shout out for dealing with all of that. Without your help we wouldn’t be able to deliver such high quality. Thank you.

All this work has given sal_vager quite some poetic inspiration. For the second week in a row we have been given another of his creations:

Localization is so much work Japanese, Chinese, makes my head hurt Spanish at least, is little pain Russian? Reach for the vodka again

But luckily for our QA testers, the localization effort is almost coming to fruition and soon they will be able to focus on some other exciting stuff, but we’re not quite there, yet.

Having said that, let’s move on to the development team, who are also working hard to finish with the localization. This week’s activities included some work on the font settings and display, specifically some rework and tweaking for the Chinese and Japanese fonts. Similarly, we worked on localizing strings found in the contracts system: refactoring them, or in other words adapting and extending the code of unlocalized strings and applying Lingoona’s grammar rules to them.

In between the localization work, the devs also took the time to fix a few bugs including an annoyance where if you pinned PAW windows on vessels and then paused the game or used timewarp the pinned PAWs would disappear. They’ve also been working on ironing out the runway seam alignment issues. JPLRepo has refactored and aligned the Tier3 Runway and begun working on the Tier2 Runway. The Devs have also begun looking into the terrain issues that you all have been reporting. What would really help the devs out is if people could submit actual save files (must be stock only) of these terrain issues (with a vessel next to them) we’d really appreciate it and that would really speed up the investigations. There are lots of bug reports on this one but if we could ask you to attach saves to this report that would be terrific!

Our friends at Blitworks continue to advance with the console update, they are now working to adapt all the building and editor UIs to be more gamepad-friendly, which is a laborious but necessary improvement to the UI. We are very happy to be working with them and we’re excited to bring Loud and Clear to consoles!

Our artists are helping with the localization of the KSPedia, they’ve managed to finish Japanese and Chinese so far, and now it’s time for Español. In addition the retopology of the Kerbals continues and they are trying to decide between blendshapes and bones, blendshapes and bones. Hey, why not both?

We are also very happy to welcome our new Senior Programer, Bjorn, who is nicknamed BJ because it’s a lot easier to pronounce than his actual name. He was a gameplay programmer on Shadows of the Damned, Killer is Dead, and Batman: Arkham Knight. He’s lived on four continents (although he admits that he’s cheating with that number because Europe and Asia are technically the same continent) and wants to round out the final three before he dies (which will probably coincide with his visit to Antarctica). BJ would like to go to space and is considering stalking Elon Musk on the off chance that it’ll get him there faster. Some of his favourite video games are: the Gran Turismo series , the DIRT series, the Forza series, the Project Gotham Racing series, Batman: Arkham Asylum, The Last of Us, Super Meat Boy, Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio, Metal Gear Solid 3, BioShock, Okami, Braid, SSX, Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus. Welcome BJ!

Finally, we want to thank everyone who participated on the Kerbal Spice Program contest, we were all amazed by the creativity, ingenuity and skills of the participants. We had lots of fun and we think the people that entered did too, since a new forum thread called Kerbal Spice Program 2.0 was opened as a fan-fuelled continuation of the contest. Here are some of our favorite creations for this contest and click here to see them all if you haven’t.

Coffee Tea Party by EBOSHI

It’s a bird… It’s a Plane… It’s a…? by wrcsubers

Flying Spaghetti Monster by DV-13

Kerbal Cake Program by Drillgorg

Toaster with solid fuel powered toasts by DV-13

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!