KSP Weekly: The new Devnotes

Welcome to KSP Weekly, Kerbonauts! This is the new format for the Devnotes and every Friday, we will continue to share the weekly highlights of KSP development, news and more!

Basically, we decided to change the day for this publication in order to be able to get any kerbal news to you fresh from the oven, without having to wait over the weekend to publish them (this also helps us to write about our weekly activities just after we’ve carried them out). Without further ado, let’s begin!

First of all, the whole team wants to say another massive thanks to you all of you bug hunters in the pre-release testing, we’ve got a really impressive 1.2 in no small part to all your help.

The QA team has been quite busy during these past couple of weeks. This time has been taken up with triage and investigation into some outstanding reports in readiness for a potential patch. It appears that most of the reports are more feedback than outright bugs, and that bears testament to the excellent pre-release reports that we received. Feedback is always good, and allows us to focus on those improvements instead of chasing bugs. To put this into context, and for those that like their numbers. Between 1.1.3 and 1.2 there were:

Over 3000 code revisions



Over 100 branch merges



Nearly 1000 internal and public issue reports resolved (including feature additions)



On the dev side and with 1.2 out the door, we’ve been monitoring feedback, and working on a combination of small fixes and things that didn’t quite make it in time for the 1.2 code freeze to be bundled in 1.2.1. This involved planning, delving into some model issues and working on finishing the biome updates.

An example of these bugs people have found is the standardisation in gravity values to 9.80665, making the planet orbits shift ever so slightly and the geosync heights change - they’ll be back in their right positions, and another has been the UI flicker in the editor scene that is seen once you load up enough parts. Another relevant fix was the lights on the thrusters. Currently we’re working on fixing the Fuel Flow bug, as well, and the team has also been working on recompiling the Asteroid Day mission for 1.2, and we’ll have it ready for you all really soon.

This week, there has been also a lot of work on localizing the game: we’ve been reviewing the overall solution for localization while making sure that we will be able to support mod localization. During this localization process, some of our devs had to learn in depth the insides of the KSPedia to come up with a solution for its localization. We still can’t announce which languages we will include, though, but we would definitely love to hear your opinion.

Moreover, and as many of you probably know, we’ve been recruiting talent since june, we’ve interviewed many candidates and we’re really excited to have new talent join our ranks, we’ll introduce our newest team member next week.

Furthermore, a couple of us got the chance to go to Steam Dev Days, which certainly was a fantastic experience, where we did not only got the chance to learn about the latest technologies and trends of the industry, but we met many fellow developers who share the same passion towards gaming as we do, many of them were KSP fans, as well! It was great to meet all of these amazing people and we gave them some Jeb plushies we hope they will enjoy.

While in Seattle, we also had the chance to participate in a Microsoft’s ID@Xbox meeting, where we had the chance to chat with other indie developers and share our experiences.

We’ll continue to participate in upcoming industry events and we’ll keep giving away Jeb plushies, whenever we go to these events.

The Jeb plushies became a hit since we started giving them away. Unfortunately, our previous provider stopped making them, but on the bright side, we still have many of them in stock and we will continue to give them away. We will be making several contest via Social Media Channels, so stayed tuned in order to get your own Jeb.

We have been in a continuous makeover of our Social Media interactions; not only to update the content we share, but on how we’ll use the different channels we have to better engage with the community. For example, we will export KSPTV highlights to our YouTube channel; there is a great deal of fantastic content being made by the talented streamers that are part of KSPTV and we want to help them share it. We hope you enjoy those highlights and do not worry, we will continue to share trailers, teasers and shorts in that channel whenever we produce them.

In addition we would absolutely love to hear some feedback about Squadcast. What would you like to see there?

This week we stumbled upon this amazing gift that the fellow Kebonaut, Paarma, received from his sister:

Learn more about it here.



This also reminds us, that we recently made available some printable 3D-Pods blueprints that you can download here.

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!