KSP Weekly: From publisher to a comet’s name



Welcome to KSP Weekly, everyone! Did you know that on a day like this, but in the year 374, was the 9th recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet? Back then people saw comets as omens of bad fortune, such as deaths of rulers, famine and even the coming of plagues. It was not until 18 years after Sir Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he outlined his laws of gravity and motion, that Newton’s friend editor and publisher, Edmond Halley, was able to determine after examining historical records that the orbital elements of a comet that had appeared in 1682 were nearly the same as those of two comets that had appeared in 1531 (observed by Petrus Apianus) and 1607 (observed by Johannes Kepler). Halley thus concluded that all three comets were, in fact, the same object returning every 76 years, a period that has since been amended to every 75–76 years. Needless to say that the comet was named after him. But we’re here to talk about everything Kerbal, so after that brief curious fact, let’s begin.



The QA team was very busy this week as we get closer to the final development stages for the localization pack update. Doing keyboard layout testing and spending hours reading through KSPedia in every language and part descriptions. Then doing it all again as soon as the next build comes out. And there are of course other pending bugs that have been fixed and now need some checking.

In between all the testing, sal_vager had the chance to set up a new PC and he was so excited that he wrote a small lyrical piece about it:

Setting up the new PC Minty fresh, it’s Linux you see All AMD and open source It’ll give an edge in tech support From black screens to missing text I’ll take a look and do my best

On the dev front the localization effort continues as well. Some of the devs have spent some time refactoring code so that some ingrained things can be localized, such as CelestialBody Names, Biome names, Vessel Situations and so on. Furthermore, Jplrepo was able to complete the seam fixes on all runways and they have been signed off by QA. He worked together with BJ on the general terrain seam investigations. The root cause has been identified as something that has changed in Unity itself between KSP versions from 1.1.3 to 1.2.0. Whilst we continue to investigate the Unity changes, fixes for the problem have been tested and work. BJ is now working on implementing the fixes.

Additionally, the kerbal name generator for the localization pack is almost done, and the site generator is coming along nicely, all thanks to the help from the volunteers. Here are some examples of some of the names the site generator is now able to spawn(bare in mind that these have still to pass the volunteer’s check and may still have some errors):

Spanish: Cuenca de Schiaparelli

Russian: Бесплодные земли Билла

Japanese: キリムのベンド

Chinese: 玫瑰坡

English: Trigger’s Lament

Past Tuesday, TriggerAu wrote a Developer Article about The Weighing of Fonts, which basically talks about the difficulties the developers faced when trying to fit new characters and symbols in the KSP interface, we highly recommend it. We’re planning to continue which the Developer Articles to let developers talk about their work and experiences in greater detail and to give you more insight about some of the challenges we face when developing KSP. These won’t be scheduled as regular forum posts, as we’ll be having multiple authors sharing info whenever they are willing and able. Nevertheless we will let you know when these come out, so you don’t miss any and keep your eyes peeled on the DevBlogs section of the forum for when they do.

Now let’s talk a little bit about our friends at Blitworks, who continue with the console update on a safe and steady pace. As we mentioned last week, we received the first builds to start the testing process and although there is still much to do, some of our testers have stated that these builds are becoming increasingly stable!

Finally on the Art Division, there’s been some fixing of KSPedia issues and the work on the retopology of animation models is now focusing on blendshapes of the eyelids for the male and female characters.

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!

Happy launchings!