KSP Weekly: The flight of the Norge and forging missions

Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. In the past issue we remembered the launch of the Mercury-Redstone 3 spacecraft, but the aeronautic achievements of humankind are not exclusively reserved for the space era. The road towards the first spaceships was paved by many engineers, pilots and scientists long before the first rockets were tested. For example, on a day like today in 1926 the first verified trip of any kind and likely the first overflight to the North Pole was carried out by the Norge, a semi-rigid Italian-built airship. It was also the first aircraft to fly over the polar ice cap between Europe and America. The expedition was the brainchild of polar explorer and expedition leader Roald Amundsen, the airship’s designer and pilot Umberto Nobile and American explorer Lincoln Ellsworth, who financed the expedition along with the Aero Club of Norway. This, like many others, is an example of humankind’s unquenchable curiosity, tenacity and spirit. We like to remember these achivements when we think about the possibilities for the Mission Builder. We can’t wait to see all the creative and unique missions that will sprout from the community once the expansion is released. But for now, let’s go through this week’s advancements in the development of the projects we are working on.



Let’s begin with the 1.3 Update. The QA team has been identifying where some of the minor problems unique to each language that have a common cause are, along with generally dotting the tees and crossing the eyes that the language volunteers have been working on. General fixes have also been on the agenda with some more long standing bugs fixed; Shadows and orbits this week. The QA volunteers are now poking away at some of the other problems that we really want to see fixed. Asteroid Day is now fully integrated, bugs identified and fixed, and the contracts more balanced.

For some detailed info, the dev team spent some time to identify the cause of the issue with flickering shadows in flight scene which is caused by a combination of a Unity bug and floating point precision problems with the game universe size. The devs implemented a compromise fix for this which does not eliminate the problem but makes it much better. Speaking of shadows, devs also fixed a small shadow bug where there are gaps in the shadows for KSC buildings and also a shadow bug in the SPH that appeared at certain camera angles. They fixed part highlighters showing/highlighting landing lights flares. Similarly, we’ve implemented a fix to maneuver nodes that were stale (in the past) where if the vessel made a maneuver that made the conics patches invalid for that node it would cause the node to disappear and/or create null reference exceptions. In these cases the game will now intercept invalid conics for a maneuver node that is in the past and automatically delete the node (with an appropriate screen message to tell the player).

This week we finalized the Modders Notes and Font information, as well as an updated PartTools to support those for Localization. These help facilitate things for the modding community.

While devs and testers have been busy fixing bugs and polishing the final details for the 1.3 update release, the artists have had their share of fixing things. Particularly textures and KSPedia, but also have begun to help with the design of communication materials (yes, we do these in-house). Here is a sneak peak of the concept we came up with for the Spanish version:

In other news, Blitworks keeps up the fast pace of supplying us with new and improved builds each day for consoles. It looks like testers will be having a lovely Friday night of checking all the resulting ready-to-test reports. In the meantime, they have been busy making sure every celestial body has its flyby and mission achievements working properly.



Now, let’s move on and talk about Making History expansion, where we have been tweaking some aspects of the design and progress is being done every single day. One example is the new UI, which is a key part for the Mission Builder. Devs have been following the new design and functionality improvements to ensure an easy to use and intuitive gameplay experience. Additionally, we have been working on setting up the functionality for whitelisting and blacklisting parts for missions. This way mission designers can set which parts can be used for a mission or, conversely, they can block parts. On this note, we’ve also been continuing work on part failures for missions.

The QA team, on the other hand, have been testing new parts for the expansion including an early IVA for the lander.

And speaking about new parts, we have more art to show you this week - specifically, our first American engine for the expansion. We know several users were speculating on whether we would be including ‘tank butts’ on the new engines, so hopefully this new image puts things to rest. As you can see, our new engine comes in a ‘naked’ form (that is, no tank butt). This is the default, and also how it will render when surface attached. In addition, two extra nodes will be provided. One with the smallest node size that conforms to the engine’s geometry (in this case, a 1.875), and a second node - if needed - that conforms to the appropriate size class of that engine (a 2.5m node is shown in the one we’ve included). This should allow all of the new engines to blend well with existing fuel tanks (both stock and modded) while also giving players a lot more flexibility in engine placement. Here’s a second image showing the three different modes for this engine (Naked, 1.875, 2.5). Based on the dynamic tank butt size, we will also be including a little bit of extra fuel as well.

Finally, we encourage you to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - Creative emergency escape and re-entry vehicles. This time around the challenge consists of making an escape pod(s) for a space station and/or a ship in orbit and this time, the participants will receive an Official Challenge Badge “THE GOLDEN KERBAL”. 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!

