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Devnotes Tuesday: Bugs and more bugs to be fixed!


SQUAD

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Hello everyone,

We’re midway through the pre-release now, 763 bugs have been reported so far, 513 of which still need to be confirmed, investigated, fixed or confirmed fixed. Everyone at Squad has been busy with the pre-release in some way, and all the developers have spent last week tackling the most important bugs that we can fix or work around on our end.

A lot of the edge cases we tested and applied fixes for, came back again, under more extreme edge cases and some new issues got caught as well. We’re very happy with the thorough testing and Felipe (HarvesteR) wants to thank everyone who’s been participating in our pre-release. There’s not a lot that gets past a group of testers numbering in the thousands, that’s for sure. .

Mike (Mu) reworked the mesh creation of the fairings, much reducing garbage creation and thus speeding things up. Thanks to help from Brian (Arsonide) they pinpointed a method which sets the vessel’s colliders up correctly as a cause of major lag. This system has been completely reworked and has much reduced staging and startup frame times. The fixes are currently in QA testing and will hopefully be part of a pre-release build shortly.

Ted (Ted) has spent a lot of time triaging issues with Mathew (sal_vager) and Steve (Squelch), ensuring the team has a steady stream of confirmed and reproducible bugs to be working. Steve has been delving into some problems that had been put to the side. Most notably, ATI GPUs on Linux are causing issues and there doesn’t seem to be an easy fix. A workaround to get KSP into at least a playable state is being sought. Mathew has been mostly limited to housework on the bug tracker, looking for duplicate bug reports and confirming newly reported issues.

More bug fixes on Bob’s (Roverdude) side. One of them is the concept of volume for all resources (this is not currently used in stock, but will be extremely helpful for resource-switching mods), the ability to configure resource converters to work on mass instead of ‘units’ and a hook to help with dynamic crew capacities in things like inflatable habitats, etc.  

Brian (Arsonide) put a lot into wheel collisions, and the issues that were arising from clipped wheels. A bug in our current version of Unity stops us from setting the wheels to ignore collisions with other parts on the same vessel, like we do with all other parts. This caused them to do some unpredictable things, but Brian found a solution involving layers that allows us to work around this limitation. He also re-exported all wheel models to have proper collision layers, so the individual parts of each wheel will not rub against each other either, which was also causing problems for players.

Nathanael (NathanKell) fixed a bug in RCS where thrust was not properly clamped, and a combination of translation and rotation could lead to more than 100% thrust. Also fixed a longstanding issue where the reported KSPAssembly version was 0.24, now it’s 1.1. Female kerbals are no longer going blue in the face (really!) and the docking tutorial had some cleanup. On the improvements side due to a kind code donation from stupid_chris we now have his Config Node. Extensions in stock; and save game files now store a list of the mods that have been installed and also which are currently active.

Daniel (danRosas) and Pablo (Paul_Amsterdam) have further refined the KSPedia screens.They had a look at the great work that Trigger did, and got their hands dirty on moving the layout around. All new screens should be available soon on the Pre-Release version. Right now Dan is working on the controller maps for consoles. Jim nailed out more and more typos and tweaks to improve the content. He is really happy with the way its shaping up and people can have a look at it all 150 screens as they are seen in the game here: http://imgur.com/a/av8VK

Bill (Taniwha) put the finishing touches on the new UI controls and added some bells and whistles to the previously existing ones, giving modders a bit more control. In other areas, he fixed a bug that has plagued him since 0.19.1: green highlighted parts in my screenshots despite having hit F2. Now the part highlighting respects the state of the rest of the GUI. On top of that, he fixed a problem in the date/time formatting code that would throw exceptions if fed NaN time.

Nathan (Claw) has been fixing up some of the miscellaneous graphics and UI bugs and some of the surprises including the sudden “crewed parts can’t hold any crew” issue.

Chris (Porkjet) finished a new internal view for the Mk2 inline cockpit. He previously ‘borrowed’ the one from the other mk2 cockpit, but that became quite obvious with the new overlays because the canopy was too small to enable a decent view from the inside so the exterior model required some remodelling as well. It now has more and bigger windows and a bit more headroom. The door on the top is now replaced by a door on each side, to create even more room in the canopy.

http://i.imgur.com/xBSxltI.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/xnrcZMe.jpg

Kasper (KasperVld) is on study leave. He has been checking in on the 1.1 Feedback, it’s all looking great so far. Finally Joe (Dr_Turkey) is clearing the path for the (fingers crossed) final certification.

That’s it for this week, don’t forget to visit our official forums, visit us on social media or join the KSP discussions on the Subreddit!

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While I appreciate the desire to stick to your guns over the two week mark, please don't burn yourselves with a semi-permanent state of crunch in an attempt to address the issues on an arbitrary timeline rather than code readiness.

I mean, I don't want 1.1 to enter Valve time or anything, but the idea of addressing 500+ bugs in a week sounds punishing, if not impossible.

Please consider foreshadowing the extension the pre-release by a realistic amount now, rather than rescinding 1.1 at the last minute next week after finding yourselves with 300+ still to go on Friday.

Thanks for all your effort!

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28 minutes ago, SQUAD said:

In other areas, he fixed a bug that has plagued him since 0.19.1: green highlighted parts in my screenshots despite having hit F2. Now the part highlighting respects the state of the rest of the GUI.

YESSS!!!!!!!!

I have been wanting that since I first started playing!  My dreams have come true!

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32 minutes ago, SQUAD said:
On the improvements side due to a kind code donation from stupid_chris we now have his Config Node. Extensions in stock; and save game files now store a list of the mods that have been installed and also which are currently active.

Hope this helps clean up some clutter! :)

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Just now, DMagic said:

@stupid_chris These extensions? Those are handy, and it's nice not to have to keep on implementing them myself. :D

Nice work on the KSPedia entries. They are looking great, and it can be hard to appreciate how difficult it is to make short, simple explainers like that.

Yep, those! I added a few more for other data types, namely long, and all the other vector types. Also included is a string array parser and tryparse methods for all vector types in KSPUtil!

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40 minutes ago, SQUAD said:
Chris (Porkjet) finished a new internal view for the Mk2 inline cockpit. He previously ‘borrowed’ the one from the other mk2 cockpit, but that became quite obvious with the new overlays because the canopy was too small to enable a decent view from the inside so the exterior model required some remodelling as well. It now has more and bigger windows and a bit more headroom. The door on the top is now replaced by a door on each side, to create even more room in the canopy.

http://i.imgur.com/xBSxltI.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/xnrcZMe.jpg

Oh wow..... I love it!!! 

Wait, is this already available in the pre-release?  Or in things yet to come?

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56 minutes ago, SQUAD said:

More bug fixes on Bob’s (Roverdude) side. One of them is the concept of volume for all resources (this is not currently used in stock, but will be extremely helpful for resource-switching mods), the ability to configure resource converters to work on mass instead of ‘units’ and a hook to help with dynamic crew capacities in things like inflatable habitats, etc. 

Curious to know more about this. Does this mean you can specify how many liters a unit of volume is for a specific resource? I know that some resources in the Community Resource Pack aren't standardized on 1-liter... Also, what does the dynamic crew capacities entail?

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Wow, just wow. My hype for 1.1 has increased at least three-fold after seeing the KSPedia and those images of the updated cockpit. You guys never fail to impress me!

Edited by Rthsom
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Beautiful work on the revised mk2 inline. The former top entry hatch always seemed a bit odd. 

I also hope that Squad will not rush to meet a particular ship date. If more time is needed to sort out lingering issues, please take it.

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Once upon a time,

Squad would give us a rhyme.

Sadly it has been a long time,

Surely this must be a crime.

                                                -A bad poem from a sad fan.

And yes I rhymed time with time

 

Edited by Jhawk1099
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Wow, the new Mk 2 Inline IVA is just beautiful and stellar, and probably the best IVA yet! It also appears to come with a docking mode, too! This makes me wonder if the Mk I pod will get a new IVA, as its IVA is bigger than the pod and puffs up the exterior. Nevertheless, it will be nice to try out this new Mk 2 Cockpit model in the pre-release or in the full release version of 1.1.

Also, it looks like KSP will be much more lag free than it originally was at the start of the 1.1 pre-release.
 

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