KSP Weekly: The Arecibo Message

Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. Next week marks the 18th anniversary of the retransmission of the Arecibo Message. An interstellar radio message originally broadcasted in 1974 towards the M13 globular cluster some 25,000 light years away from Earth, sent in the hope that extraterrestrial intelligence might receive and decipher it. Named after the Puerto Rican radio telescope from which it was sent, the message was written by Dr. Frank Drake, creator of the Drake equation (a probabilistic argument used to arrive at an estimate of the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy), with help from Carl Sagan, among others. This message carries basic information about humanity and Earth and consists of seven parts: The numbers one to ten; the atomic numbers of the elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, which make up deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA); the formulas for the sugars and bases in the nucleotides of DNA; the number of nucleotides in DNA, and a graphic of the double helix structure of DNA; a graphic figure of a human, the dimension (physical height) of an average man, and the human population of Earth; a graphic of the Solar System indicating which of the planets the message is coming from; and a graphic of the Arecibo radio telescope and the dimension (the physical diameter) of the transmitting antenna dish. We don’t know if somebody else has received the message, maybe we’ll never know or maybe some little green men experimenting with their space program have and they are doing everything they can to pay us a visit. But we’re here to talk about everything Kerbal, so let’s begin.

Let’s begin with KSP for consoles, where the QA team has been working on testing and providing feedback on the new control scheme. Blitworks is making great progress and we are looking forward to testing every fresh new build coming out of the oven, they are very solid right now and still getting better each time.

In other news, the team continues trawling the bugtracker, looking for bugs to confirm and prioritize, one of which is a grammar library issue that affects some Linux players. Our sincere thanks go to those that not only took the time to report the problem, but aided in diagnosing and testing a potential fix. Meanwhile more bugs have been fixed for the upcoming 1.3.1 patch release. For instance: The Sun movement has been fixed, so we still retain our shadow rough patch/fix while also restoring the movement of the sun back to the way it was before (nice and smooth). Similarly, Kerbals can no longer EVA from inside fairings (but can from interstage fairings) to avoid exploding vessels.

Naturally, the work on the Making History Expansion continues and at good pace if we may say so. This last week, for example, various aspects of its design have been looked at and worked on. We have been working on getting all of the usable nodes for a mission displayed in lists and creating the nodes when they’re dragged onto the canvas. In the “Infrastructure” portion of the Mission’s Expansions we’ve been finalizing work around the way expansions are built and loaded. This uses the AssetBundle feature of Unity to package up the content we set as Expansion only. On the loading side we have an extra loader that then reads in the info about the expansion and loads the components from the bundles. We also spent some time making the same architecture work without the asset bundles in the editor - so our devs can work as lazily as possible and not have to build the bundles for every change made (at their request) ​​​​​​​:P. Additionally, we have been working on the feature of the Mission Builder that allows mission creators to select if vessels will be built by the player of the mission or if they will be assigned from a list of custom ones by the creator. For this, we are using in-house built internal logic for setting a vessel starting state. Lastly for the development updates has been the very fun task for the new expansion that handles the logic of the Undo and Redo functionality in the Mission Builder, we are doing our best to nail this task to be as memory efficient, stable and functional as possible. In the end the system will allow mods to register their own undo actions and custom controls.



On an artistic level, we keep on working on the Lunar Landing module and Vostok 1-inspired IVAs, all while the QA team continues to test and revise the initial Mission Expansion builds, making sure the core game still functions correctly after the usual post release code merges while work is done on the expansion. There’s still much to do, but every day it gets closer to a functioning system that we can start testing in earnest.



By the way, as you have already noticed, the Steam Summer Sale has begun and we have also made sure our minds, bodies, and wallets are prepared for this exciting event. And of course, Kerbals couldn’t be left out of this craze, so we prepared a huge discount you should definitely check out.



Finally, we encourage you to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - Crosswise the Sea! This time around, the challenge consist of flying across the sea in an airplane and land safely, using stock parts only. Pretty straightforward, right? So, are you up to the challenge? Let’s see who can build the most original airplane. Check it out, share your creations and win a special official badge in the process!



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!





P.S: If you are near the L.A. area, KSP streamer Avera9eJoe let us know that he has been planning a community get-together on Asteroid Day. If you’re interested in going, send him a PM! Here is what he has to say:

Hello again everyone! With Asteroid Day coinciding with my summer vacation, I’m planning a casual get-together at the California Science Center. We’ll be meeting at 10:00am PST on June 30th outside the main doors and visiting the free Air and Space exhibits and paid Space Shuttle Endeavor pavilion before having lunch and going our separate ways. Please send me a PM if you can make it. I look forwards to seeing some of you in person! Thanks :)