KSP Weekly: Fixing projects and making contact

Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. Tomorrow, May 20, is the 511th anniversary of the death of one of the most important figures in human history; the genovese, Christopher Columbus. Even though he never knew he had arrived at an uncharted continent and most likely wasn’t the first European to reach American shores (vikings), it is undeniable that his arrival to the island of Guanahani, called San Salvador by Columbus and located in what is now part of the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, would change the world forever. Credited for opening up the Americas to European colonization, Columbus’ voyages reminds us of the consequences that the clash between alien civilizations and pathogens can have. If we ever encounter life beyond earth, we will have to ask ourselves the ethical implications of making contact could have. Let’s hope that we will be able to deal with such dilemma in the best way possible if that day ever comes. Maybe that is also why we haven’t been contacted so far… But we’re here to talk about everything Kerbal, so let’s begin!



This week has seen more fine detail tweaks to Update 1.3 along with a few more fixes that need to be checked over by QA. We’ve started looking at optimizing some things and early results are looking good. For example, we have made several improvements on performance and optimization for the Localization Format calls & KSP clocks. Similarly, we have been able to reduce and some cases eliminate several GC (Garbage Collection) spikes reported in the Unity profiler; Whether caused by string concatenation, implicit numeric casting, misusage of StringBuilders, or other variations of string manipulation within the Update and FixedUpdate critical methods. But the devs haven’t finished yet and more optimizations are still being found and applied.

There has also been a lot of in-game testing on the pre-release, while trying to catch up with the bug reports that have been filed on the tracker. Consequently, devs fixed icon shaders for part icons to fix unlit (lights) and flags, as well as some localization texts and UI bugs. Additionally, the sun glare jittering around in Mapview/Tracking station, which was caused by last week’s sun shadows fix, was fixed, coupled with a refactor of units of measurement in the game. These and other fixes can be seen in this week’s Pre-Release build.

And hopefully pleasing the modding community, we have completed the Modders Notes regarding KSPedia and static files replacement processes for modders.

And to wrap up the Update 1.3 section of this week’s issue, we were able to finish some trailers and promotional images we’ll use for the official release and some KSPedia corrections for the Spanish version of the game.

In other news, progress on KSP for Consoles continues. Blitworks keeps sending us new builds and consequently keeping our QA team busy. We even had to get new test-kits to help share the load in that regard. All in all, the builds are looking good and, slowly but surely, we’re getting close to our objective of delivering solid KSP versions to console players.

Moving on to the Making History expansion, where steady progress has not been a stranger, we have been working on creating a basic node structure using the config node format and handling the loading thereof, so that everyone and anyone can create new nodes to add to the Mission Builder. Likewise, some devs are working on a window to visualize and manipulate PQS celestial bodies in the MB.

Furthermore, the work on new IVA and the UI design continues, here’s a sneak peak (it is blurred since it is still a prototype). Not to mention new parts for the expansion, too! This week was spent working on decouplers and stack separators to support the new stack sizes, as well as some more Russian-inspired parts. Here’s an image of the new 5m decoupler and separator. The interior color differences should make it easier to tell these apart in the VAB tool box while keeping the exterior colors clean and consistent with the new rocket parts they support. As an added bonus for those players that enjoy more ‘creative’ uses for our parts - all of the new separators and decouplers will be set up with hollow collider configurations (in this case, four mesh colliders).

Finally, we encourage you to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - Taking the scenic route! This time around the challenge consists of launching a craft to orbit with turned off overlays (Press ‘F2’ before launching) and then land safely. Are you up to the challenge? Check it out and share your creations!

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!

