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KSP Weekly: Kerbal Burazāzu


SQUAD

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Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. As you probably expected, we love video games here at the KSP HQ and today we celebrate because it is the 34th anniversary of the Japanese release of the classic arcade platformer Mario Burazāzu, also known as Mario Bros. The game, developed by legends Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi, is one of the first platform games ever created, along with Donkey Kong. It also introduced Mario’s brother, Luigi, who was created for the multiplayer mode by doing a palette swap of Mario. Similarly, the game brought up several elements that were later adopted by its successors, such as the “POW” blocks and the Shellcreepers, the conceptual ancestors of the Koopa Troopas. The game came out in the same year as the North American video game crash of 1983, so it wasn’t a major success there, but its modest success in the Japanese arcades was enough for the company to continue with what is today the most recognizable franchise in video game history. To date, Mario Bros. has been released for more than a dozen platforms and is considered as one of the most memorable arcade classics. But after this small homage, let’s move on to KSP and the development progress.

The QA team has been busy testing fixes and improvements for the 1.3.1 patch, looking for more candidates for inclusion from the public reports, and of course giving the whole thing a thorough workout. In their search for issues they’ve been using forum posts as clues, trying to find unreported bugs in 1.3.0 to get fixed for the upcoming patch. Meanwhile the devs worked on completing the localization of tutorials and scenarios for 1.3.1 and QA have begun the process of putting them through their paces in each of the languages.

Console testing is again very much in our purview, so together with the external test team, intensive testing has produced a wealth of reports and feedback for the developers. It is difficult to divulge just how far along the process is, but for those of you that are concerned, we can say that things are looking good. We are aware that you are keen to see the results, and we’re excited about the progress. Please bear with us while we endeavor to polish and resolve the obscure edge cases which on consoles can be so unforgiving and equally difficult to patch post release.

In Making History news, the devs have been looking into methods for making the mission flow logic easier to use for the mission creators, as well as tweaking and improving the design of various elements found within the Mission Builder. Additionally, the team completed adding the ability for multiple vessels to spawn into a mission based on where the mission creator has specified them into a mission. This includes landed anywhere, in orbit anywhere or on any Launchpad. While working on this, a bug was discovered whereby vessels will sometimes spawn below or above the ground when landed - usually when the player has changed their terrain settings but this also occurs regularly for recovery parts and Kerbal contracts that are landed on a planet; naturally the team got busy and are working hard on resolving the issue.

Devs also spent some time during the week reviewing code, functionality and making things work together in the expansion for what we have already delivered. Similarly, reviewing and iterating on how vessels and their parameters are specified in the UI by mission creators and working on iterative design was part of the agenda.

The Celestial Body viewer in the Mission Builder got some attention, too. The biome selector is ready and  the team made several changes internally to allow additional modes for the future. The team also worked in a new in-house solution to the TrackIR plugin that solves all the issues with the x64 builds so you guys can continue playing KSP in any version you prefer.

The EndNodes features for the Mission Builder were completed this week. This feature allows the mission creator to specify which nodes in their mission signal the end of the mission and to define the conditions of how the mission ends, whether that is a successful ending or a failure.

On the artistic side of the development, the art team worked on the vernier engine to go with our RD-107 analogue. One of the challenges with this part was balancing something that would be recognizable as part of an R7 rocket, but also keep the ‘lego’ feel our players are used to.  To achieve this, we decided to split the verniers out as a separate part, so players could choose to either use them in a configuration reminiscent of the R7, or in other interesting and creative ways. The flip side is that you lose some of the unique asymmetric aspects of an R7 booster (including the handy notch that fits the verniers on the central stack of the rocket).  This is a theme you’re going to see quite a bit of as the parts for Making History progress.  While we want parts to be recognizable, our direction is one where we aim for taking heavy inspiration from vs. building precise replicas of historic craft and parts, with the primary goal being to provide new parts that are flexible, balanced, and fun to use for both historic as well as player generated missions.

The vernier itself is a liquid fuel engine with a single axis gimbal with a 45 degree range (22.5 degrees each direction), making it an excellent form of control authority (we include a total of twelve of these on our Vostok 1-inspired engine), as well as an interesting engine in its own right that I expect our players will find many creative uses for.

Here’s a pic of its current state, along with a pic of how it would be used on our Vostok-inspired craft file, and examples of the gimbal range.  There’s still some work to do on it, but we suspect most people will appreciate seeing the current progress.

And that’s not all, the team started texturing the Vostok 1-inspired IVA. The UV mapping and the normals paintings are almost finished. We also started a new stage in the UI for the Mission Builder workflow, with most of the screens and UIs currently built from wireframes, the team started placing final assets on them. Here’s some preview examples.

Naturally, as more parts have been coming online for the expansion, testing and reporting on those has also been part of the duties. The QA team hears with anticipation from the devs that they will soon begin testing the fruits of their labors on the mission planning components.

Finally, we encourage you to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - Landing on Duna! This time around, the challenge consists of travelling to and landing on Duna from the Kerbal’s homeworld without using oxidizer of any kind and with stock parts only. We also want to remind you that from now on we’ll spread out the completion time for each challenge depending on their complexity. This means that you will have more time to complete the challenges and we’ll have also more time to think of better ones for you to try out. Are you up to the challenge? Check it out and share your creations!

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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2 minutes ago, invision said:

donkey kong was one of the first games i remember playing on coleco vision back when we had to walk to school with no shoes and 24 feet of snow on the ground.

 

You were lucky. We only had Pong and had to walk to work with no shoes in 50 feet of snow. 

Edited by Foxster
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Vernier Vernor
Apollo pod and the mk1-2
A lot of repetition with this expansion. Hopefully an art pass eventually distances stock parts from DLC parts. Vernier is functionally different though so it's got that which is great though, hopefully it's a midway between the thud and twitch because the game needs one of those..

 

Craft spawning sounds amazing though. Already see a lot of uses for that.

Edited by Spartwo
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30 minutes ago, Spartwo said:

Vernier Vernor
...
A lot of repetition with this expansion.

Actually, they are pretty different - the Vernier engine operates as a high-gimbal engine, and is not tied to the RCS system.  So it has some interesting uses as a descent engine as well for small landers outside of the context of the expansion missions.  

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Just now, regex said:

Vernier looks pretty good, I could use that for an Atlas, although the bells feel ... "thick" on the models.

There will likely be some passes on the bells (both for the Vernier engines and the RD-107) and keep them with an appropriately 'chunky' Kerbal feel, but not quite as chunky as they are at the moment :wink: 

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Very nice to see some more preview images; thank you.  Every Friday the first thing I do is skim (more frantically than I'll admit) through the post and look for blue hyperlinked preview images. :cool:

Edited by Raptor9
Grammer
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48 minutes ago, 0111narwhalz said:

Do you mean "Launchpad" as in "rocket launchpad" or as a general term which describes both the Launchpad and the Runway?

If it's the former… :0.0:

The correct term probably should be launch site... so the runway and the launchpad are launch sites.

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54 minutes ago, RoverDude said:

There will likely be some passes on the bells (both for the Vernier engines and the RD-107) and keep them with an appropriately 'chunky' Kerbal feel, but not quite as chunky as they are at the moment :wink: 

That's good to hear because they do feel a bit too chunky for what they're supposed to be. I'm looking forward to the finished product.

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1 hour ago, SQUAD said:

which on consoles can be so unforgiving and equally difficult to patch post release.

Why the developers of Warframe, for example, after a big update can release 2-3 patches on the PS4 in ONE day? What prevented you from releasing ONE patch FOR THE YEAR correcting the problem with the save files? Oh yes! You released a patch on Xbox, as ugly as the whole port.

Edited by Kerbuvim
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1 hour ago, Kerbuvim said:

Why the developers of Warframe, for example, after a big update can release 2-3 patches on the PS4 in ONE day? What prevented you from releasing ONE patch FOR THE YEAR correcting the problem with the save files? Oh yes! You released a patch on Xbox, as ugly as the whole port.

I too am curious as to the details of the answers to these questions but in a slightly more polite sense. I can understand the headache that would come from separating the dev team to work on a separate patch while working on the port but why the lack of transparency? I mean look at the amount of detail and explanation you've provided for the work on the current build for PC. Could we at least get "So-and-so has been working on this-and-that" as well? I understand you guys are doing your best to fix the the port but you aren't truly being fair by giving  us a vague paragraph or two while providing a multitude of data as to the progress of the PC version. We don't even get more info then you provided regarding Mario Bros? I know it's not deliberate (I hope) but it does seem slightly insulting at best. I love you guys! But throw us a bone and maybe give us some improved screenshots or tell us some of the details about your console QA process works. Who (if anyone) at Squad is working on it? How is Blitworks doing? What prevents you guys from having regular patches like other game devolopers? Can we expect a release anytime soon? Are there any particular bugs that you guys have smashed that are noteworthy? These are the types of questions all of us console gamers are asking without answers. I know that there are some questions that you can't answer but any would be nice and it would surely help to cool down the tempers of the raging console players. I'm not necessarily asking for answers now but I, amongst many others would like these kinds of things addressed in future KSP Weeklys. We deserve a bit more to look forward to every Friday instead of rewording what we've already heard. Once again, love you guys and I wish y'all the best of luck on your masterpiece that is Kerbal Space Program!

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1 hour ago, Kerbuvim said:

Why the developers of Warframe, for example, after a big update can release 2-3 patches on the PS4 in ONE day? What prevented you from releasing ONE patch FOR THE YEAR correcting the problem with the save files? Oh yes! You released a patch on Xbox, as ugly as the whole port.

 

14 minutes ago, Homedawgian said:

I too am curious as to the details of the answers to these questions but in a slightly more polite sense. I can understand the headache that would come from separating the dev team to work on a separate patch while working on the port but why the lack of transparency? I mean look at the amount of detail and explanation you've provided for the work on the current build for PC. Could we at least get "So-and-so has been working on this-and-that" as well? I understand you guys are doing your best to fix the the port but you aren't truly being fair by giving  us a vague paragraph or two while providing a multitude of data as to the progress of the PC version. We don't even get more info then you provided regarding Mario Bros? I know it's not deliberate (I hope) but it does seem slightly insulting at best. I love you guys! But throw us a bone and maybe give us some improved screenshots or tell us some of the details about your console QA process works. Who (if anyone) at Squad is working on it? How is Blitworks doing? What prevents you guys from having regular patches like other game devolopers? Can we expect a release anytime soon? Are there any particular bugs that you guys have smashed that are noteworthy? These are the types of questions all of us console gamers are asking without answers. I know that there are some questions that you can't answer but any would be nice and it would surely help to cool down the tempers of the raging console players. I'm not necessarily asking for answers now but I, amongst many others would like these kinds of things addressed in future KSP Weeklys. We deserve a bit more to look forward to every Friday instead of rewording what we've already heard. Once again, love you guys and I wish y'all the best of luck on your masterpiece that is Kerbal Space Program!

From what I understand, from many other threads on these forums discussing the topic, the port that flying tiger made was trashed completely.It was so bad, there wasn't a patch that could be written to fix the issues. Blitz works had to completely rewrite the port from scratch. That is why there wasn't a patch released. 

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Just now, Galileo said:

 

From what I understand, from many other threads on these forums discussing the topic, the port that flying tiger made was trashed completely.It was so bad, there wasn't a patch that could be written to fix the issues. Blitz works had to completely rewrite the port from scratch. That is why there wasn't a patch released. 

Oh I understood that much, I'm constantly checking the forums and whatnot. I'd just like to hear how things are actually going. As for the lack of patches, are they not able to patch the work from a different dev because of some legal/liability reason? Things like that would be the type of information I'd be interested in.

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I can't help but be pessimistic with the expansion, based on the amount of time it took to complete the localization update and the 1.3.1 patch.  Based on the current progress, I doubt we will see this update before Summer 2018.  I personally think the stock game is long overdue for some clouds and for the love of all that is good, please replace the skybox with something that isn't such a low resolution mess like we have now :)

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Hi Squadies :)

Those new engines look absolutely cool. You know me, I love those preview pics.

And lots of juicy information this time as well. Thanks for that.

If you are looking for tricky bugs to squash, the only one I am running into on a regular and very frustrating basis is the one where the claw and docking ports  lock up. For example when you can´t decouple an asteroid, or modules from ships, stations or bases. If you need more information just pm me. If that one could be solved, that would be amazing. 

For now I´m trying to record my entry for the Duna landing challenge and learn how to make a video. Very nice challenge.

Keep up the good work :D

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Nice little engines there!

Making History is going to be just a parts pack for me, I'm not interested in community challeges at all.  The more I see little bits and bobs like the Verniers, the more likely I am to purchase MH to support the game and get some fun new parts.

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5 hours ago, SQUAD said:
In their search for issues they’ve been using forum posts as clues, trying to find unreported bugs in 1.3.0 to get fixed for the upcoming patch.

Interesting; thanks for this glimpse behind the veil.

48 minutes ago, KerrMü said:

If you are looking for tricky bugs to squash, the only one I am running into on a regular and very frustrating basis is the one where the claw and docking ports  lock up. For example when you can´t decouple an asteroid, or modules from ships, stations or bases. If you need more information just pm me. If that one could be solved, that would be amazing. 

I saw this pretty consistently when I:

  1. Moved the active vessel's docking port into magnet-activation range of another vessel's port
  2. But the arrangement of the ports was such that docking could not be completed
  3. Switched to the other vessel
  4. Decoupled a decoupler
  5. With the docking ports now free to move, docking finally completes

At that point, just as you say, they were docked and there was no option to undock. I had to edit the save to fix it; both ports said "state = Acquire" or "state = Acquire (Dockee)" when they should have said "state = Docked". (I can provide copies of the save files if the QA team wants to use this forum post as a clue. :D)

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