KSP Weekly: We have a way with words

Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. This week has been incredibly busy, for the first time ever we had a release that needed to be announced in 5 different languages! We had lots of fun doing so though, and we’re very happy to see that many people have received it with so much excitement and enthusiasm. For a long time, we had been receiving innumerable requests from non-english speakers to localize the game in their language and being able to comply gives us lots of satisfaction. But this is only the beginning, we’re looking into the possibility of adding more languages in the future, too. But now let’s go through the activities that kept the team busy throughout this week.

As expected, this week included a huge amount of work preparing the final details of Kerbal Space Program 1.3 Away with words. We hit the pre-release stage a couple of months ago and thanks to the amazing team of volunteers and you all, who have been providing us with invaluable feedback and reports via the bugtracker, we achieved one of our smoothest releases, yet.

Some of the work we had to do this week for this release included of course, time ironing out the final bugs. For example fixing one of the start contracts in Career Mode, which was not working properly, removing NullRef exceptions and mending some grammar issues encountered in some languages. We also worked on performance to mitigate the impact of the localization processing and, naturally, preparing for and doing all the release work, which is no small deed.



This week the QA team was deeply involved with this release’s smoke testing, which basically is a sort of preliminary testing executed to reveal simple failures severe enough to reject a prospective release. Our team had to select and run a subset of test cases that covered the most important functionalities of the 1.3 update, to ascertain if all the crucial functions worked correctly. Also, it turns out a lot of people are modding the same copy that Steam is managing as well, and the update is breaking mods and making the game crash. Until mods are updated for v1.3, it’s best to opt into one of the “previous version” betas such as 1.2.2. Copy it somewhere else on your HDD so Steam can’t interfere with it, and leave v1.3 stock for now.

Lastly on this topic, we had to prepare all the promotional assets for the release, which included localized trailers, image packages and announcements in all 5 languages, this gave us an idea of the workload we are going to deal with for all future releases.

The work on the updated version of KSP for consoles continues at a steady pace and now we’ll have more hands to test the builds that Blitworks continuously provides us. One of the most palpable improvements with this version is performance. This is quite evident, for example, with the behaviour of shadows in the game, which had to be tuned down in the previous version, and now look much better. Here, take a look: This is how it looked before in the XboxOne version and this is how they look now. And don’t worry, release estimations in software development are a tricky and inaccurate science, but progress is being made and we’ll keep you updated.

Meanwhile, there’s been lots of work on tweaking, improving, and finalizing various elements of the design for the Making History Expansion. Things are progressing very nicely and we hope to have something to show off fairly soon!

While the design is being worked on we’ve also been implementing components of the new UI for the Mission Builder, as well as new functionality and visuals for the expansion. One example for you all is the Mission Briefing dialog; it’s now built and functional and the devs found an in-house use for it to leave each other “special” messages in the briefing screens between code commits :) This of course is not the intended function, but rather is meant to be the briefing that the mission creator writes for their mission . There’s also been further work on the CelestialBody interaction in the Mission Builder, and we thought we should clarify that a bit after last weeks comments. Part of mission planning can involve interactions with a planet - eg. placing a target for landing, selecting biomes, (and a few others, but hey we can’t let all the mysteries out of the bag) - this work gives the Mission Creator the ability to build their mission for these items interacting with the planet visually. Hopefully that explains this a bit better.

Finally, to conclude this week’s issue, the artists spent this week continuing with new parts for the expansion, including a Voskhod-2 style expandable airlock, check it out!

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!