Devnote Tuesday: “Point sharp end towards space”

Felipe (HarvesteR): Many tweaks and additions to talk about this week. The Stability overlay has been progressing slowly, so that’s on the backburner for a bit, to make time to take care of other issues that were still pending. I’ve been helping out with integrating the new aerodynamics in, and doing new tweaks and improvements to the lift and control surface modules. The old infiniglide issue is now a thing of the past. With the new V² lift model, it took on much more severe proportions, and wasn’t something we could ignore anymore. Other than that, I’ve been going over other areas of the game which needed improvement, mainly around the input handling systems.

Since version 0.18 and the addition of docking, we’ve had this docking control mode which very few players ever got around to using. I didn’t remove that, but I did come up with a more elegant way to implement the control binding switching, so we could do away with all those duplicate input mappings on the settings screen. Now, there is only one input mapping for pitch, yaw, roll and linear translations, and the docking mode mapping is done using the secondary key bindings and a new state toggling system which is simpler and more flexible than the old way. So much more flexible, in fact, that you can now use docking mode as an alternate control scheme in any way you want. Rather use it to swap about yaw and roll inputs for controlling rockets and spaceplanes with a joystick? Now you can. Also, Axis bindings now also have secondary mappings of their own, so you can have a second axis bound to each action, either as a redundancy or with a different set of UI mode toggles.

Aside from the input revision, I’ve also gone over the Engines code, and tweaked them so that now throttle regulates the fuel flow rate, instead of the final thrust. That means fuel flow stays constant, and as Isp changes as you leave the atmosphere, thrust output increases (as opposed to thrust staying constant and fuel consumption changing).

And last but certainly not least, I’ve done a complete revision of the old Chase camera mode. Now, instead of being completely attached to the vessel in a motion sickness inducing way, it pivots about a coordinate system defined by your velocity vector, or the direction of a targeted object, if any. I’ve also fixed all camera modes not responding to input during coordinate frame transitions. That allows the new Chase cam to switch reference frames on the fly without any rapid changes in orientation (which lead to motion sickness). I have to say, it’s quickly becoming my new favorite cam mode.

Alex (aLeXmOrA): Been working on web tasks for other Squad projects.

Mike (Mu): The aero update continues unabated. I have reworked the atmospheric model into something a little more based on reality, this makes for easier balancing and configuring of other atmospheres. It now includes temperature into the equations and has a much more realistic pressure/density curve. Have also been getting constant feedback from the QA team on how it’s flying and tweaking the balance and models. There are some funky new debug displays for the aerodynamics and even a graph or two for those who will want to delve into things a little deeper.

Marco (Samssonart): Maxmaps and I reviewed the Reddit feedback we got on how the community thinks we should go about overhauling the tutorials and we began working on it accordingly, the majority seems to think that in terms of number of tutorials and variety we’re not doing that bad, we’re just going to expand the basic flight tutorial to cover a whole flight to orbit, and make it less text and more action oriented, we’re also going to add a rendezvous tutorial, because a lot of people think the difficulty leap between getting to Mun and back and catching an asteroid is too big, we need that missing link to give it more continuity and easing that transition. There were a couple more things that surfaced when looking at Reddit’s opinions, most people think there are way too many key bindings to remember, which is true, although there’s not much we can do about it, since KSP is a complex game with many actions, so I thought of adding a little key binding reminder during flight, sort of what you get in fighting games, just a screen that lets you see the key bindings you currently have assigned in a case sensitive manner, e.g. if you’re on EVA you will only see the relevant key bindings for EVA, if you’re in Map View you will only see what you can do in Map View and so on, in order to prevent a wall of text that won’t be of much help. The final conclusion we drew from the survey is that some people think the docking UI mode is basically useless, but we still haven’t decided what we’re going to do about it, other than gather more intel.

Jim (Romfarer): I just wanted to clear up some misconceptions about the Engineer’s Report design concern feature. Last week I said I was concerned about performance on some of the tests. The design concern feature is not a list of parts a vessel has and has not. It is a set of tests which analyze your vessel for possible issues you may run into. For example a big part of these tests are dealing with resource flow and will prompt when you have resource containers which are not being drained, consumers (such as engines) not getting the fuel they need, etc. And for every of these tests the parts in question are highlighted. This means the tests have to run every time you attach and detach a part and in the case of stack resource flow the system has to check for every resource container, and then trace back from the consumers which of these containers are not being drained.

Max (Maxmaps): I’ve been working closely with Samssonart to improve our tutorials, and also overseeing everything regarding the aero update, which turned out to be larger and far cooler than originally planned. This is a good thing. Also got to sit down with danRosas to plan the eventual 1.0 animation, and it’s looking like the best one so far. Other than that, my life is meetings, emails and emails that lead to meetings, signing contracts and shaking hands when physically possible. Merch deals are fun.

Ted (Ted): QA Team and I are plugging away at aero testing. As I’m sure many of you know, aerodynamics is no simple feature to both code and test and it’s been an incredibly rewarding, yet challenging, iterative testing and development process. Nevertheless, the developers, QA team and I have been making great progress on it and it’s really shaping up to be a very solid foundation that we can now tweak and balance to a good polish.

Additionally, I’ve been spending the past day setting up an OSX testbed here in order to further address any OSX issues that our players are encountering. Having rarely used OSX/Apple products before, I’ve been struggling with the Windows/Linux mindset but thankfully seem to be shaking it.

Lastly, I’ve been doing a bit of work on our QA Team’s internal documentation in order to ensure that we’re working fluidly and efficiently as a team and have the support documentation to fall back on if issues do arise.

Rogelio (Roger): Last week I finished the in-game render I was working on, I think it looks really cool, I liked the lighting result that I got, It really looked the way i wanted, here at the office Dan gave me some tips on how it should be lightened. Now we’ve been working on the video for the 1.0 v, I think it will be so hilarious, we’ve started to set up props and building models for the needed scenery, I think we’ll be busy with these tasks for this week, hopefully we also will begin to animate and do render tests.

Kasper (KasperVld): I’ve started to look after many what used to be Rowsdower’s tasks, such as managing the Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and other social media outlets, and taking care of KSP-TV and the Media Group. It’s been a mountain of work that resulted in a few very early mornings and late nights, but that was to be expected. We have a contest planned for this Valentine’s day, so keep a look out for when that drops!