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Devnote Tuesday: QA focus


SQUAD

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1 hour ago, garwel said:

Sure. But in terms of cost or mass efficiency, sending several probes is still preferential to manned ships in 90% cases.

Anyway, it's just my thoughts about my own playthrough that may be wrong for many others. I guess this change may be ok for balance in the stock version where you don't have LS. 

I find that, in general, my probes are 1-way and my manned missions are the ones that return non-transmitted science.

Also, funds are not a major concern for most of my play-time, but time-efficiency is, so 1 probe per planetary system(to scan for resources and use scansat to locate biomes/landing areas), then a manned mission is usually about it.

(I am, however experimenting with an automated fuel base style probe which could be a 3rd probe for each planet, and would actually let me get landed science on low-g bodies[Moho is about the limit, and has a version with fewer ore tanks due to the high gravity])

 

Of course the science storage would probably also make Caveman style games somewhat easier, as you would not need to ensure all of your experiments survived reentry(along with not needing duplicate reuseable science parts and still being able to collect science data from each of the areas you pass through)

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heh, cant wait for  the next update. been playing with  bills launchpad mod, and bobs uks mod  (never paid enough attention that they are the main science and enginner kerbals  n.n)  now im just practicing base building for when i move up to the next version ( ship crashed on mun, lost some engines, but i got enough parts that with kis/kas i can assemble a ship out of pods, tanks and a terrier to get me back to LKO for a recovery mission.  i made my own way now of a recover x kerman from orbit n.n

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4 hours ago, SQUAD said:
A few elusive bugs surrounding wheels remained until this week, but Brian (Arsonide) has been a trooper in hunting these down. Most notably he found the phantom force that was causing wheeled (and legged) vessels to slowly drift up hills. As it turned out the force that normally sticks you to the hill was pushing a bit too hard. He also patched up an issue that was causing some legs to blow up on vessel load, and removed a now unnecessary workaround for our legs that was causing them to skip a good deal of their animations. And people (other than Danny2462) will also be pleased to know that Kerbals on EVA no longer interact violently with wheel colliders.

Leaving it a little late, aren't we?  Well...better late than never. 

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It just so happens that bisecting the multiple thousands of commits between now and last May takes time. Shocker! :]

 

A bit more on the transfer bit that didn't make it:

To do it I took CrewTransfer and made it into a base transfer mechanic that both CrewTransfer and (now) ExperimentTransfer inherit from. This means that any mod can also easily inherit from it to make their own item transfer mechanic; all it takes is overriding what info is needed to start, methods to report whether a part is a valid (or semi-valid, i.e. can take crew but is full) part, and a method to handle when you click on the destination part.

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5 hours ago, SQUAD said:

 Jeremie (Nightingale) has tackled a large number of long-standing issues with the user interface, and also added some quality-of-life improvements there as well. Part highlighting in the VAB and SPH was fixed so that it no longer highlights extra parts when you load in a new craft, and the screen message system no longer tries to fit every message on the screen into one unreadable lump when there’s a lot of messages, it will scroll through them instead. Meanwhile Sébastien (Sarbian) taught map labels to stay away from each other when the player zooms out, keeping everything nice and readable, and also tweaked the ‘set orbit’ cheat menu so that it won’t set you on a collision course. Bill (taniwha) then worked his magic to allow this menu to set you to rendezvous with a different vessel.

All of this sounds fantastic, thank you!

5 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Jim (Romfarer) continued tweaking the fuel flow overlay that was featured on Squadcast not too long ago. The overlay now shows green lines on connections which carry fuel, and grey lines on all other connections. He was kind enough to share an image of the end result: http://i.imgur.com/cfi7TRZ.jpg

Is there some sort of highlighting mechanic to only show certain paths? That looks like it would be very confusing trying to track down issues in complex craft. Still pretty awesome.

5 hours ago, SQUAD said:

 A few elusive bugs surrounding wheels remained until this week, but Brian (Arsonide) has been a trooper in hunting these down. Most notably he found the phantom force that was causing wheeled (and legged) vessels to slowly drift up hills. As it turned out the force that normally sticks you to the hill was pushing a bit too hard. He also patched up an issue that was causing some legs to blow up on vessel load, and removed a now unnecessary workaround for our legs that was causing them to skip a good deal of their animations. And people (other than Danny2462) will also be pleased to know that Kerbals on EVA no longer interact violently with wheel colliders.

A very welcome development, thank you. Happy to see the latest Unity update working out for you guys.

8 minutes ago, Firemetal said:

First, will there be an early access option for steam users

There has never been an "early access" option for Steam users, why would there be one now?

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3 minutes ago, regex said:

There has never been an "early access" option for Steam users, why would there be one now?

There was, sort of.  Steam users got a release earlier than Store users (by a couple of weeks IIRC).  Reason given was that it was a small update and didn't warrant the extra bandwidth on the Stores servers.

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2 minutes ago, Sonny_Jim said:

There was, sort of.  Steam users got a release earlier than Store users (by a couple of weeks IIRC).  Reason given was that it was a small update and didn't warrant the extra bandwidth on the Stores servers.

I don't recall that.  There was the opt-in testing of 1.1 that was done using the Steam system (because Steam has that infrastructure already), and the fact that GoG always delays their releases.  But any released version has always had a simultaneous Store & Steam release.

Edited by Alshain
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1 minute ago, Sonny_Jim said:

There was, sort of.

Sort of? That testing period was never intended as "early access", it was to get the widest testing available for an engine update. It's unfortunate that people treated it as "early access" in any way, shape, or form.

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It was very recent and it was a small update which was never released on the official Store nor was it available through update in the launcher (which was broken).  Instead, they just waited until the next release (which was simultaneous with Store/Steam).

It was never intended as 'early access', but it boiled down to anyone who had bought through Steam getting an update whereas people who had bought it direct from KSP.com had to wait a couple of weeks.

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@Sonny_Jim I think you are talking about the 1.1 pre-release testing.  However, it's confusing because you say it was a small patch (which 1.1 was not).  Let me assure you the pre-release was not early access, it was unpaid work for those who volunteered. Throughout all but the last few days the game was mostly unplayable. (honestly it was still unplayable after release so you have to imagine it was worse before that).

EDIT: Oh, there was an un-numbered patch that added Steam Controller support.  For obvious reasons that wouldn't need to be on the store.

Edited by Alshain
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1 hour ago, klgraham1013 said:

Leaving it a little late, aren't we?  Well...better late than never. 

Uh, no. Wheel fixes have been an ongoing process for quite a while. I'm just summarizing some developments this week as we fixed a few additional issues.

Edited by Arsonide
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2 minutes ago, Arsonide said:

Uh, no this has been an ongoing process for quite a while. I'm just summarizing this week as we fixed a few additional issues.

It's almost as if you guys work on this stuff for a living.

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This is veering offtopic now, but

7 minutes ago, Alshain said:

I think you are talking about the 1.1 pre-release testing.

It was around 1.0.5, it was only a hotfix for a small issue.  Trust me, there was a period where the Steam version was more recent than the Store version :wink:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/3scm0b/silent_patch_for_105_available/

(Note the part about " Update: an issue with the website where it would still only offer build 1024 for download has been resolved. ")

 

Edited by Sonny_Jim
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7 minutes ago, Sonny_Jim said:

This is veering offtopic now, but

It was around 1.0.5, it was only a hotfix for a small issue.  Trust me, there was a period where the Steam version was more recent than the Store version :wink:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/3scm0b/silent_patch_for_105_available/

(Note the part about " Update: an issue with the website where it would still only offer build 1024 for download has been resolved. ")

 

They had a bug in their website code.  That doesn't exactly scream "early access", and I'm pretty sure it was fixed within a day or so, not weeks.  It was probably fixed before most people even attempted to download it.

Edited by Alshain
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5 minutes ago, Sonny_Jim said:

This is veering offtopic now, but

It was around 1.0.5, it was only a hotfix for a small issue.  Trust me, there was a period where the Steam version was more recent than the Store version :wink:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/3scm0b/silent_patch_for_105_available/

(Note the part about " Update: an issue with the website where it would still only offer build 1024 for download has been resolved. ")

 

I remember that, IIRC the delay for the store version was only a matter of a day or two. 

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22 minutes ago, Arsonide said:

Uh, no. Wheel fixes have been an ongoing process for quite a while. I'm just summarizing some developments this week as we fixed a few additional issues.

The troll got out.  Sorry about that.  I've locked him in his cage for the foreseeable future.

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