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Devnote Tuesday: Thank you!


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<figure class="tmblr-full" data-orig-height="92" data-orig-width="480">tumblr_inline_nn6en7dsO41rr2wit_540.jpg</figure>Felipe (HarvesteR): The crunch is upon us now, most certainly. It seems to be unavoidable in these situations, but experimentals is moving along at a very impressive pace, and we’ve been making some really cool final additions and tweaks to the game. The focus, at least on my end, has been mostly turned towards improving that sense of completion. It is true we’ve been exceedingly fortunate this far in that we’ve had very few critical issues, considering the size of the update. That certainly did help in giving us the opportunities to add these small but really-not-so-small details that make a game feel more complete.

This week, along with various other tweaks and fixes, we’ve been having a look at the Science systems, specifically the purpose of the Lab module, which so far hasn’t been very worthwhile in terms of effort spent vs. the rewards it brings. We’ve completely rethought how Science Labs work now. Instead of merely boosting the xmit factor of a science experiment for a small amount (something that scientists can do now), and allowing you to restore inoperable experiments (also something scientists can do now), the Lab now works much more like a long-term research facility. Now, when you run experiments, you can transfer data to the lab just as before, but instead of a quick process for a small boost in the xmit factor, the data fed to the lab will generate a steady output of Science for a very long time, ultimately yielding far more science than transmitting or even recovering. This, of course, requires the labs to be manned by scientists, and have a steady supply of electricity. It should greatly increase the benefits of setting up orbiting science stations and surface bases, however, and also give you good reason to visit them every now and then. (The data does decay after a while, and the labs can only hold so much processed data before having to transmit, so don’t expect to be able to timewarp your way to infinite science).

A lot of work has also gone into revising the stats for every part, and making sure they go in the proper tech nodes, and have the correct costs and stats. One big change among these was that the old Avionics Nose Cone, which was being used in a kind of placeholder-y manner as an atmospheric scanner science device, has now been given a new purpose as a non-autonomous SAS device. It’s not a probe core, but it provides SAS services to non-pilot crews. Should be useful when you really want your scientists to be able to impress their peers with their elite flying skills. As for the atmosphere scanner, we’ve got a wholly new part for that job.

Speaking of parts now, we’ve had quite a few new ones added this week. Bob “RoverDude†and PorkJet have been working like mad, turning out a huge amount of new parts. I hinted last week at two new parts from Bob. Those are Service Bays, available in 1.25m and 2.5m sizes. These hollow cylindrical bays open up letting you mount sensitive equipment that would otherwise tend to explode during reentry (yes) inside a protective compartment, which works very much like fairings do, only these can be closed back up again. Apart from these, we also have new heat shield parts (all sizes), new Mk3 wings, new landing gears, and PJ’s been hard at work overhauling many of the older spaceplane parts, which really needed to catch up, style-wise.

Lastly, I’ve dedicated a couple of days here to implement a feature which I think has been missing for far too long from the game, and I really didn’t want to leave it out of our 1.0 release. More on that one later though… I’m very happy I got the opportunity to implement it though. I feel it wouldn’t have been a proper release without it.

Anyhow, if you’ve been following our #KerbalCountdown, you’ve probably realized that this is our last dev note before the release. Not that this means there won’t be dev notes after the release of course, but it’s a good opportunity to give you guys a massive THANK YOU!! To the entire KSP community, who stood by us throughout the four years we’ve been developing the game, who believed in our crazy notion of a build-a-rocket-and-fly-it game, and who continuously supported us through good and bad times, from the humble beginnings of our weird little project, all the way through today, as we stand on the brink of this huge moment for the game, and to us.

As for myself, what can I say? KSP has been a life-changing project for me… I honestly can’t imagine what my life would be today without it, and it’s just mind-boggling to look at what next week means for it as my first real game project… It’s exhilarating and frightening, stressful, relieving, satisfying and yet filled with anticipation, and so many other things at the same time… I don’t think it’s quite clicked yet for me… But anyhow, I’m really looking forward for what we have coming for this update and beyond. There’s fun times ahead, that much I can say.

Many Cheers to everyone, and happy launchings! See you on the other side!

Mike (Mu): Another fun week of experimentals. We finished the re-entry occlusion system and have been pressing on with fixing things and implementing some last minute items. The atmosphere and thermal balancing continues unabated, trying to strike a good middle ground between the hardcore players and the not-so-hardcore ones is always tough.

Marco (Samssonart): As many of you know we have a very important date coming next Monday, so instead of boring you people with details of how experimentals are going I want to take this opportunity to thank you, you are a fantastic community, it’s been quite a ride, but you’ve always been there for us, giving us amazing feedback, kind words and a couple occasional headaches.

I hope you enjoy 1.0 and have as much fun playing it as we did developing it, cheers!

Daniel (danRosas): working full steam ahead! Everything is moving forward. The animation is almost done, still figuring out stuff with our sound designer, with Rogelio and myself. We’re missing a couple of shots rendering, that needed some last minute corrections. If everything goes well, they should be done during the night (considering that each frame takes between 10 to 20min to render, yep it takes that long, it could be worse though considering the equipment we’re managing). I can say that it’s the biggest, longest, and filled with kerbal characters everywhere. Most sequences have been color corrected, lens blured and composited, except from the ones that need rendering of course. There are still some missing VFX here and there.

Jim (Romfarer): This week i’ve mainly been working on the tech-tree icons. It was a bit of a nightmare to update the icons before since they were hardcoded into the prefab every node in the tech tree is generated from. So I replaced the whole icon structure, made the tech tree accept any icon thrown at it and updated the dev tech tree tool. With this change i was able to reassign all icons on the tech tree in less than an hour. It also paid off while making further revisions and creating the demo tech tree. As an added bonus, every modded tech tree can have custom icons.

Max (Maxmaps): Last notes before 1.0. I can’t believe I’m typing this. Merch deals finalized. We’ll be joining new stores as well. A whole lot more meetings to partake in this week and I probably can’t really afford to rest or sleep from here til Monday, but as long as everything works out as planned I simply can’t complain. I love being part of this project and I can only hope you will love 1.0 as much as we loved making it.

Ted (Ted): It’s all happening in Experimentals. By far the most impressive and energetic Experimental Team is hard at work on 1.0 and they’re working at a breakneck pace. It’s a wonder the devs can even still type with all the work that everyone has been putting in!

As for myself, I’ve been performing the usual Experimental duties of Tester Herding, Tracker Cleaning, Bug Triaging and Feedback Reading. It’s all going extremely well though and the Exp Team and I are really looking forward to you all getting your space mitts on KSP 1.0!

Rogelio (Roger): I’ve been doing some post production on the shots that are already rendered, We’re almost done, there are some missing details for the final sequence but hopefully it’ll be ready by tomorrow afternoon. today I’m doing some camera tracking the long and hard way because the shortcut didn’t work for one of the flares that we integrated in post. I’m really excited and happy with the preview that Dan rendered earlier it looks very cool, you guys will tell us what you think soon.

Kasper (KasperVld): I managed to spook the devs a little by mentioning the fact that these are the final devnotes before the release of Kerbal Space Program 1.0. It’s been a wild ride so far and it’ll be a wild ride for a long time to come. At a time like this there’s only one appropriate thing to do: on behalf of everyone at Squad I’d like to convey our deepest gratitude to all volunteers, YouTubers, livestreamers, moderators, experimental & QA testers and everyone who contributed to or was a part of the community. Thank you for going down this road with us and sticking with it through all the bumps that we encountered. Thank you, we couldn’t have done it without you.

Chris (Porkjet): I graduated earlier this month, and since then I’ve had all the time I needed to model a lot of parts, some new ones, and a lot of revamps for old parts. Some of those old friends got quite the face-lift, I hope you’ll still recognize them.

It’s been frantic but also lots of fun. Being part of the development of KSP is one of the coolest things of my life, and I’m proud that i got this chance. I couldn’t in my wildest dreams have imagined this a few years ago, when i picked up this funny little game about green men in explodey rockets. I also wanna give big thanks to the KSP community, you guys just rock and your support has been extremely encouraging. I hope you’ll have a lot of fun with 1.0!

And to end this post with something to look at, here’s a few screenshots of me enjoying new wings in those glorious new aerodynamics!

Bob (Roverdude): First off - it’s been awesome working with the folks at Squad on this release! .And it’s been a pretty hectic week, mostly around heat and thermal. .I’ve been working on the heat shields (including a modification to the shader so you can get scorch effects as the ablator is burned off), also some really cool heat management and auto-throttling logic for the drill and ISRU (so they will throttle down as heat nears the danger zone until they cool off). .Here’s a pic of the ablation shader, where you can see the heat shield as it goes through the ablation process:

In addition, knocked out several models including the new Xenon tank and the heat shields, and did a few tweaks to the service bays. .With resources pretty much in the can, I also got to do some work on the science system.

Lastly, we’re taking bets on how long before the community discovers the resources easter egg we snuck in for you (I’m betting two months post launch). One hint: .It’s a pretty large easter egg.

Brian (Arsonide): I’ve been working with the team for two releases now, and once again it’s been a blast. For me, this release was primarily about thoroughly balancing career mode and polishing up the early game with several new systems that gently nudge the player in the right direction when he might not be sure what to do next. Beyond that, I’ve also been working on implementing tourism, part recoveries, grand tours, and resource extraction contracts, so there will be plenty of things for you folks to try when the patch hits. Everything feels really solid now, and this week has primarily been about those small bits of polish that make it perfect.

I’d definitely like to thank the community for your feedback and support during Experimentals, QA, and the development of Fine Print. I’d like to thank Squad, for this awesome opportunity. I should also probably work my super supportive wife in here somewhere so I don’t get in trouble…anyway, back to work!

Edited by KasperVld
fixing layout
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Thank you right back, both for the notes and for the game :)

Felipe (HarvesteR): I’ve dedicated a couple of days here to implement a feature which I think has been missing for far too long from the game, and I really didn’t want to leave it out of our 1.0 release. More on that one later though… I’m very happy I got the opportunity to implement it though. I feel it wouldn’t have been a proper release without it.

Clouds and/or cities confirmed!

j/k

But really, I hope this is clouds. And/or cities.

Edited by 5thHorseman
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Felipe (HarvesteR): As for myself, what can I say? KSP has been a life-changing project for me… I honestly can’t imagine what my life would be today without it, and it’s just mind-boggling to look at what next week means for it as my first real game project… It’s exhilarating and frightening, stressful, relieving, satisfying and yet filled with anticipation, and so many other things at the same time… I don’t think it’s quite clicked yet for me… But anyhow, I’m really looking forward for what we have coming for this update and beyond. There’s fun times ahead, that much I can say.
Despite how critical I've been of your game I want to congratulate you on getting this far in your journey. I'm can tell you've learned a ton about development in that time. Well done, and please keep up the good work; you and your team have come a long way.
Mike (Mu): Another fun week of experimentals. We finished the re-entry occlusion system and have been pressing on with fixing things and implementing some last minute items. The atmosphere and thermal balancing continues unabated, trying to strike a good middle ground between the hardcore players and the not-so-hardcore ones is always tough.
There's only one group of players you need to cater to: the hardcore. ;) Edited by KasperVld
EULA reasons.
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Well.... At this point I can only honestly express best wishes to the whole tream.

I've been playing KSP for just over a year (how sad I am of not knowing about it sooner) but it's hands down one of the best games I have on my 600+ library.

I hope the launch goes beyond your expectations and I honestly hope all the hard work pays off for you...

You've done a heck of a job and you should all feel proud not just for doing a great game but for creating a teaching tool and a software that helped space exploration be on the spotlight again and helps everyone (kids, teens and adults) dream about space and learn about it. More then a game, KSP is public service!

With all that said... I can't wait for 1.0!!!!! GO HYPE TRAIN!!!! :D

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No squad, thank you for making this awesome game! It is probably the best money $17 (I think that's what it was when I bought it) that I have ever spent. I probably wouldn't have gotten into space stuff without KSP. I am really looking forward to 1.0!

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Thank YOU Harvester, and the rest of the team, for creating and refining most of the rewarding gaming, no scratch that, just plain rewarding personal experiences I've ever had. It's been a helluva lot of fun and I've learned so much. Can't wait to see what 1.0 brings.

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Well, Harv and dev team , it has been quite a ride since four years ago . So thank you for letting us to have our fun with your product while you were making it and to get four years of fun that we would not have otherwise.

Anyway, let's see ourselves again in the other side of Monday release ;)

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The release is looking better and better. Good work!

I'm very glad I supported such a great game. Let us hope there are now young kids fooling around with rockets that will make great future engineers, pilots and scientists eager to change the world and push the space age even further.

We wouldn't be here if you wouldn't be here o7

Edited by Veeltch
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Lastly, we’re taking bets on how long before the community discovers the resources easter egg we snuck in for you (I’m betting two months post launch). One hint: .It’s a pretty large easter egg.

Lemme guess, you made Dres into a diamond mine? lol

Anyways, have you guys decided what you're doing to do for Tuesdays now and will we still have the squadcasts?

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Wow, great dev notes, and notes from the modder helpers as well!

I'm glad I am able to be apart of The Kommunity. I'm also glad that you were able to put up with us!

I will echo other posters that this game is the best $26 I have ever spent, and the most life changing, thank you.

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