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KSP Weekly: We have a way with words


SQUAD

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Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. This week has been incredibly busy, for the first time ever we had a release that needed to be announced in 5 different languages! We had lots of fun doing so though, and we’re very happy to see that many people have received it with so much excitement and enthusiasm. For a long time, we had been receiving innumerable requests from non-english speakers to localize the game in their language and being able to comply gives us lots of satisfaction. But this is only the beginning, we’re looking into the possibility of adding more languages in the future, too. But now let’s go through the activities that kept the team busy throughout this week.

As expected, this week included a huge amount of work preparing the final details of Kerbal Space Program 1.3 Away with words. We hit the pre-release stage a couple of months ago and thanks to the amazing team of volunteers and you all, who have been providing us with invaluable feedback and reports via the bugtracker, we achieved one of our smoothest releases, yet.

Some of the work we had to do this week for this release included of course, time ironing out the final bugs. For example fixing one of the start contracts in Career Mode, which was not working properly, removing NullRef exceptions and mending some grammar issues encountered in some languages. We also worked on performance to mitigate the impact of the localization processing and, naturally, preparing for and doing all the release work, which is no small deed.

This week the QA team was deeply involved with this release’s smoke testing, which basically is a sort of preliminary testing executed to reveal simple failures severe enough to reject a prospective release. Our team had to select and run a subset of test cases that covered the most important functionalities of the 1.3 update, to ascertain if all the crucial functions worked correctly. Also, it turns out a lot of people are modding the same copy that Steam is managing as well, and the update is breaking mods and making the game crash. Until mods are updated for v1.3, it’s best to opt into one of the “previous version” betas such as 1.2.2. Copy it somewhere else on your HDD so Steam can’t interfere with it, and leave v1.3 stock for now.

Lastly on this topic, we had to prepare all the promotional assets for the release, which included localized trailers, image packages and announcements in all 5 languages, this gave us an idea of the workload we are going to deal with for all future releases.

The work on the updated version of KSP for consoles continues at a steady pace and now we’ll have more hands to test the builds that Blitworks continuously provides us. One of the most palpable improvements with this version is performance. This is quite evident, for example, with the behaviour of shadows in the game, which had to be tuned down in the previous version, and now look much better. Here, take a look: This is how it looked before in the XboxOne version and this is how they look now. And don’t worry, release estimations in software development are a tricky and inaccurate science, but progress is being made and we’ll keep you updated.

Meanwhile, there’s been lots of work on tweaking, improving, and finalizing various elements of the design for the Making History Expansion. Things are progressing very nicely and we hope to have something to show off fairly soon!

While the design is being worked on we’ve also been implementing components of the new UI for the Mission Builder, as well as new functionality and visuals for the expansion. One example for you all is the Mission Briefing dialog; it’s now built and functional and the devs found an in-house use for it to leave each other “special” messages in the briefing screens between code commits :) This of course is not the intended function, but rather is meant to be the briefing that the mission creator writes for their mission . There’s also been further work on the CelestialBody interaction in the Mission Builder, and we thought we should clarify that a bit after last weeks comments. Part of mission planning can involve interactions with a planet - eg. placing a target for landing, selecting biomes, (and a few others, but hey we can’t let all the mysteries out of the bag) - this work gives the Mission Creator the ability to build their mission for these items interacting with the planet visually. Hopefully that explains this a bit better.

Finally, to conclude this week’s issue, the artists spent this week continuing with new parts for the expansion, including a Voskhod-2 style expandable airlock, check it out!  

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!

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Can improvements (like shadow performance), or any part of BlitWorks work on the console versions come back to the PC branches, or do the different pipelines/technology make this sort of thing impossible?

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13 minutes ago, NoMrBond said:

Can improvements (like shadow performance), or any part of BlitWorks work on the console versions come back to the PC branches, or do the different pipelines/technology make this sort of thing impossible?

The "improvements" to shadows on the consoles is actually bringing them back to parity with the PC version. As it states in the OP. The first console version had to have shadow detail turned right down due to performance issues.

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Love that expanding airlock. Any moving parts are always cool to me. Two questions, though, if you could? Is that compatible with the standard size clamp-o-tron (looks about the same size), and is it specific to the new command pods, or will we be able to use it on current models as well?

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8 minutes ago, RoverDude said:

@Cpt Kerbalkrunch - it mates with a Clamp-o-tron Junior (or another airlock).  And it is a discreet part.

Sounds good. I don't use the junior very often, so it'll be nice to have a reason to. Can't wait to see it in action.

 

P.S. Had to buy something online just now so, while I got my debit card out, you can go ahead and release the expansion if you want. Just sayin'. :wink:

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3 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Until mods are updated for v1.3, it’s best to opt into one of the “previous version” betas such as 1.2.2.

So every version prior to 1.3 has been a beta? Nice. :wink: 

Other than that, its a pretty good dev note.

Sorry to hear work loads will increase due to further language inclusions, and hope the related resourcing plans are not dependent on excessive volunteering, but rather compensated participation. 

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2 hours ago, Wallygator said:

So every version prior to 1.3 has been a beta? Nice. :wink: 

Other than that, its a pretty good dev note.

Sorry to hear work loads will increase due to further language inclusions, and hope the related resourcing plans are not dependent on excessive volunteering, but rather compensated participation. 

Beta is the tab in steam (that we can't rename) that lets you choose the version to play (in case people miss your wink emoji :P)

To clarify the workload, its not mentioning an an increase, but that we have a good measure of the work required for future languages, ell except for maybe Klingon, cause native speakers might be hard to come by.

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2 hours ago, Wallygator said:

So every version prior to 1.3 has been a beta? Nice. :wink: 

 

Some of the versions felt a bit like beta, but i don´t think thats whats meant there :D

The airlock looks interesting. Could make good crew tunnels for space stations :wink: Is the docking port "integrated" or will it be a seperate part? Can´t really tell from the image...

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That airlock looks sweet!

So, now that we've got Chinese and Japanese localization, when are we going to see sneak peaks of Chinese and Japanese rocketparts? I recall a certain line 'Don't worry China, we'll get to you too' :kiss:

 

I know, I know, NDA...   (worth trying anyway :wink: )

 

Edited by LoSBoL
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Are you planning on 

7 hours ago, SQUAD said:

we’re looking into the possibility of adding more languages in the future, too

Would German be one of those languages? I'd be happy helping to translate this game into my native language. It troubles me that often I only know terms in English, it'd be fun to find adequate expressions in German so I don't have to mix up languages when talking about KSP with my friends.

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I was ambivalent about the expansion before, but my expectations and desire to buy it are quickly rising. The content I'm seeing looks great, and I'm sure that there will be more that we only get to see after it's released.

I'm also happy to hear that progress is being made for the console version. I hope that Squad can sort the issues out soon.

All in all, a pretty good update. :D

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8 hours ago, RoverDude said:

Yep, an expandable airlock - also doubles as a docking port

 

Is the code or PartModule to enable this coming with the DLC or is it now stock in 1.3? either way, very cool and looking forward to exploiting it for later mods...

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I'd like to say that Expansion's approach to the stated theme is more pleasing to me than mods covering the same theme (early spacecraft replicas). Somehow rocket parts, LEM and CM, Vostok and Voskhod's airlock look simultaneously more lego-like, more unique and more, er, kerbal - and also pretty similar to what I wanted - than their existing analogues in mods.

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3 hours ago, rudi1291 said:

The airlock looks interesting. Could make good crew tunnels for space stations :wink: Is the docking port "integrated" or will it be a seperate part? Can´t really tell from the image...

The airlock and port are on the same part.  The pod of course is separate.

7 hours ago, genbrien said:

is there a reason gameplay wise to expend/retract it or its just visual?

A bit of both.  There's certainly a case for being able to have a docking port that extends (beyond the range of the inline one we have today), but it also had to work this way to be recognizable as its historic counterpart.

2 hours ago, steedcrugeon said:

Is the code or PartModule to enable this coming with the DLC or is it now stock in 1.3?

You could do 90% of this with stock code in 1.2.x - but there will be some extra bits as part of the DLC.

Side note.  Being out of beta means we don't break stock saves.  It does not mean we keep 100% API compatibility now and forever.  For that, look at the version numbers.  Within major releases (1.1.x, 1.2.x, 1.3.x, etc.).  the API may be extended but the existing contracts are not broken.  For example, code that worked on 1.2.0 will still work on 1.2.2, though anyone leveraging something new added in 1.2.2 could render it incompatible with 1.2.0.  Since we've ticked over to 1.3, you can expect potential API changes (Same as 1.1 and 1.2).

 

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11 hours ago, SQUAD said:

this is only the beginning, we’re looking into the possibility of adding more languages in the future, too

And here we have the entire `devnotes` such as they are for the stock game. This was expected though and is no cause for alarm.

One very interesting thing I note from this weekly, the new docking port animates and moves and has connection points at both ends to attach parts to.

These are all the features robotic parts would need. Moving with parts attached to (nodes on) each end (unlike antenna or solar panels for example which only have one node)

@SQUAD @RoverDude Robotics is something I would regard as `game-changing` and worthy of a DLC...

Edited by John FX
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