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    xPDxTV
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    <h2> August 27th, 2013 </h2>
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    <h3>KSP Headline</h3>
    <p> PAX Prime is almost here but we still manage some good information! </p>
    <ul>
    <li> Your weekly developer update. </li>
    <li> Bill... Since when did he...? </li>
    <li> KerbTown and Kerbin City, is it too ambitious? </li>

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    <h3>Developement Updates</h3>
    <h4>KSP Dev Team Updates</h4>
    <ul>

    <li><b>Felipe (Harvester)</b>: Not much time for dev work this week, with Unite and PAX just a few days away. I did manage to write a cool system to output results of science experiments when you run them. The system itself is pretty uninteresting, unless you’re the sort who finds enumerated collections of data fun, but there’s a lot of potential for comedy in doing science the Kerbal way. Looking forward to developing it further when we get back.</li>

    <li><b>Rob (N3X15)</b>: Wiki upgrades and fixing, working on the front page of Spaceport which is a little more troublesome than anticipated, since stealing the code from current spaceport isn't viable. Plus, fixing the patcher on Linux (suspecting Ubuntu 13 broke something), and a few other minor emergencies here and there. Like relatives. And panicky realization that PAX is a few hours drive away from me.</li>

    <li><b>Jim (Romfarer)</b>: This week i have been completing the code that draws relations (arrows) between tech nodes on the tech tree. I've also added new graphical elements to the sub-assembly parts of the VAB. </li>

    <li><b>Chad (C7)</b>: Working on new parts for the game, modelling and animating them, along with integrating them into the game. It’s a nice change of pace. I’m going to be pretty busy with PAX until the end of the month though.</li>

    <li><b>Alex (aLeXmOrA)</b>: Finished some last features of the Launcher. Doing some tests and fixing bugs.</li>

    <li><b>Marco (Samssonart)</b>: More Launcher work, struggling with Linux business.</li>

    <li><b>Daniel (DanRosas)</b>: This week was for editing videos, and gathering interesting stuff for the upcoming conferences, like crafting logos. This week I started modeling and hopefully I’ll have an animatic for the next kerbal adventure.</li>

    <li><b>Mike (Mu)</b>: The summer conference schedule looms and I have been preparing for our Unite presentation. See you there!</li>

    <li><b>Ted (Ted)</b>: Begun testing out the Launcher that the Team has been working on, looks great so far! I've also spent today and yesterday going through all of the Experimental Applications and accepted a lot of folks on to the Team.</li>
    </ul>
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    <h3>YouTube Spotlight</h3>
    <p> This has got to be one of if not the best cinematic currently circulating the Internet for KSP. Nassault blows it out of the water with this absolutely brilliant video about a very unlikely hero. This is just one of those videos you won't want to miss!</p>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/Nassault630?feature=watch" target="_blank">Nassault</a></div>
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    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Rhpy9zBpLMw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
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    <h3>KSP Mod Spotlight</h3>
    <p> Today we feature a mod in it's alpha stages of development. KerbTown is quite possibly the most ambitious project undertaken by the mod community. Many current contributors to the project are already working and churning out the content for this latest release and you can see the fruits of their labor starting to take shape. One note of interest is that you will be required to download and install both KerbTown and Kerbin City to use this mod. Since they both go hand in hand i've linked all the relevant information down below. Making something for KerbTown is pretty simple if you have some basic experience. It's pretty much just making and texturing a 3D model (that's the experienced part) and then putting it through Unity in an almost identical way to parts, and then setting up a config file. There's a great set of instructions for the Unity and config part written by the plugin dev for people to use. KerbTown itself has a neat little GUI in the flight scene that lets you place your static object wherever you like as well, you don't need to figure out any crazy coordinates or anything. You just send out something to be in range of where you want to place something and then open up the GUI and that'll do the coordinates for you.</p>
    <ul>
    <li>*Required to Use* <a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/40374-WIP-KerbTown-v0-12-3-Beta-Place-static-buildings-cities-launch-sites-more%21" title="" target="_blank">KerbTown</a></li>
    <li>*Project Details* <a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/46643-Kerbin-City-Community-Project-phase-A-and-B">Kerbin City Project Phases</a></li>
    <li>*Required to Play* <a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/47666-Kerbin-City-OPENS%21-Build-1">Kerbin City Opens</a></li>
    </li>
    </ul>
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    <h3>Mod Showcase</h3>
    <p> In our mod showcase today we'll go over some of the many things to expect from KerbTown. I highly recommend you read the manual either in the forum link posted above or in the download folder should you choose to pick up this mod. You will have to download at least 2 separate mods to properly use KerbTown and Fly around Kerbin City. Neither of which is actually on the same page so i've linked them together for you up above. Once you have it installed it's a very cool, very ambitious project that you can take upon yourself to either create new buildings or download others creations and check them out. For Kerbin City, each person has a plot of the city to put what they wish in, with some limitations like height and not to make something utterly ridiculous. Each person then sends their completed plot to the project lead who combines that with the existing city and presumably then publishes the new version for people to use. Currently the whole project is in the first phase with the small city section and the airport. Future phases will add more "islands" like a business district, industrial area and similar. How far it'll actually get before the performance hit renders it unplayable is anyones guess though.</p>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/xPDxTV?feature=watch" target="_blank">PD</a></div>
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    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/3HvxxVnFCTw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
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    <h3> Through The Telescope </h3>
    <p>By: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives" target="_blank"> Pleborian </a></p>
    <p>"When will there be cities" is a question that a lot of you will be all too familiar with. It is a common question that both new and old players will think about at least once, many discussions have taken place on the forums as to what these would be like or the feasibility to have such things in game.</p>
    Well today I can finally put these questions to rest, right now a group of modders is working to create the first city in KSP using tools that currently exist to add custom buildings to the game world, ladies and gentlemen I give you KerbTown: <a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/40374-WIP-KerbTown-v0-12-3-Beta-Place-static-buildings-cities-launch-sites-more%21" title="" target="_blank">KerbTown Alpha Mod</a>
    <p>To read more about the project and see some of those involved head on over to the <a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/46643-Kerbin-City-Community-Project-phase-A-and-B">Kerbin City Project Phases</a> thread and see how everything is being developed.</p>
    <br/>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/BDeMRzH.jpg"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/dHe0lw7.png" alt="KerbTown Runway" /></a></div>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/ovOL4G2.jpg"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/cxiXenV.png" alt="KerbTown City" /></a></div>
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    <h3>Editor's Notes</h3>
    <p> Don't forget to keep sending in your fan creations! We love to see them all and you deserve to all be featured but we just don't have the room and deciding what goes into the weekly is a task in and of itself sometimes! Simply send me, xpdxtv, a personal forum message with your link to a forum post, imgur picture or youtube video for a chance to be featured in the next weekly!</p>
    </div>

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    <b>Brought to you by the KSP Media Group</b><br/>
    Author / Editor: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/xpdxtv" target="_blank">xPDxTV</a><br/>
    Reporter: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives" target="_blank">Pleborian</a><br/>
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    Maxmaps
    Hey guys! I’m here to inform you about the crazy con week we’ve got ahead of us here on the KSP Team.



    First off, developers Felipe Falanghe (Harvester) and Mike Geelan (Mu) are flying off to Vancouver for Unite 2013, ready to give a presentation at 3:00 PM on August 29th; How Hard Can Rocket Science be, Anyway?: Building a new universe in Kerbal Space Program.

    Fellow Unity game devs and all sorts of people from the gaming industry are welcome to seek out these Kerbal representatives (I assure you, they come in peace) to join us in the enjoyment of this celebration of the indie game industry and are welcome to join us in our talk.

    What’s that? Game development not your thing? Don’t know much about Unity other than the fact that it made Kerbal Space Program possible? Well don’t worry, because in the KSP tradition of multiple, quick succession launches, immediately afterwards we’re strapping Harvester to an SRB and it’s across the US border he goes, straight into Seattle for PAX Prime.



    Waiting for him at the landing site will be fellow Squad developer Chad Jenkins (C7) and part of the Squad PR team, Bob Holtzman (Calisker). Here we’re dealing with a schedule so tightly packed and impossibly fast-paced with a cascade of interviews, media events, a panel and even a tournament, Jeb himself was asking us to slow down.

    We blast off with a wave of interviews and media meetings, through which we’ll not only go deep into the history, makings and future of Kerbal Space Program, but we’ll be showing an exclusive, never before seen preview of update 0.22, including the Research & Development system among many other things.

    On Friday the 30th our team jumps into the PC FreePlay Area at 6:00 PM for the very first Kerbal Space Program Tournament! Observing, judging and eventually awarding an awesome Kerbal figurine for those in first, second or third place!.

    Tournament over, it’s immediately followed by two more days of meeting with press, interview giving and fan greeting all over PAX Prime, up to the last day of the event, Monday the 2nd for our pièce de résistance, an awesome panel at the Pegasus Theatre, at 11:00 AM. This time, we’re joined by DayZ developers Dean Hall and Matt Lightfoot for our joint panel: The Benefits of Players Writing Their Own Stories In Games, A discussion around a player created storyline and it’s benefits on both single player games and multiplayer games.

    All and all a fantastic week, and we hope we’ll have your interest and support for both events! If you are at PAX Prime and see the team, say hello and they might even have something fun for you to take home with you too!

    xPDxTV
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    <h2> August 20th, 2013 </h2>
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    <h3>KSP Headline</h3>
    <p> Harvester and the rest of the devs are hard at work as usual on all things Kerbal! </p>
    <ul>

    <li> Your weekly developer update. </li>
    <li> A working reciprocating engine in KSP? How does it work? </li>
    <li> Procedural fuel tanks finally hit the mod shelves of spaceport! </li>
    <li> Any landing you can walk away from? </li>

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    <h3>Developement Updates</h3>
    <h4>KSP Dev Team Updates</h4>
    <ul>

    <li><b>Felipe (Harvester)</b>: Started work on the ‘business end’ of the R&D mechanic, with the science experiment and data transmission modules for the experiment canisters and antennas. Lots of backend work to make that happen, but the implementation is starting to look really nice. </li>

    <li><b>Rob (N3X15)</b>: PHP changed some coding standards, so I spent a bunch of time making sure all the php tags were “correctâ€Â. Wrestling with file upload system still.</li>

    <li><b>Jim (Romfarer)</b>: Work continues on the Research and Development GUI. It’s all more or less working now, as in, tech can be researched and parts can be unlocked.</li>

    <li><b>Chad (C7)</b>: I’ve been working with the testing team to polish and refine my changes from over this last week. Coming along slowly but surely.</li>

    <li><b>Alex (aLeXmOrA)</b>: I keep working on the Launcher. Last week I managed to start the Patcher from the Launcher and deactivate the “Update†and “Play†buttons, so the player won’t press them while the Patcher is working. It waits until the patcher process finishes/gets killed, to activate the buttons again. Now I’m setting the assets changes of the UI Launcher.</li>

    <li><b>Marco (Samssonart)</b>: Polishing the Settings UI for the launcher and about to move on to the secret Advanced Settings</li>

    <li><b>Daniel (DanRosas)</b>: Finished the backdrop for the Astronaut Complex, after a few talks with Felipe to improve it (see attached images). Kerbals are not so tidy with their working environments, probably they have hired some Kerman to clean the mess for them. They’re just kind of sloppy, but not a mess. That’s why they forget to pick up their coffee mugs, and stuff like that, because they’re thrilled to be on the next assignment before launching into space. It gives some ideas for future animations heh. Also been adjusting some assets for the launcher.</li>

    <li><b>Mike (Mu)</b>: Been working on more subassembly work and some performance enchancements.</li>

    <li><b>Ted (Ted)</b>: I've been sorting through the Experimental Team applications, but haven't accepted any applications yet, so don't worry if you haven't heard back. Additionally, I've been looking into some of the more elusive bugs that we've encountered in the past to see if anything could be narrowed down. Additionally, the QA Team and I working on an Early Testing Branch for some revisions to the SAS that C7 has been doing.</li>

    </ul>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/Jf4BoeD.jpg"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/cSAVuIl.png" alt="Astronaut Complex Interior" /></a></div>
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    <h3>YouTube Spotlight</h3>
    <p> Today we feature once again Hizuk1 and his amazing reciprocating engine. You can trust me when I say this build is pure genious and is worth a watch and more! Check this video out and see what is possibly the coolest mechanical invention in Kerbal Space Program yet!</p>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/Hizuk1?feature=watch" target="_blank">Hizuk1</a></div>
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    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ilynT_i4XBc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>

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    <h3>KSP Mod Spotlight</h3>
    <p> Today we feature another very cool procedural part. Ever since the release of procedural wings and other procedural parts I knew it was only a matter of time before procedural tanks hit the market. Today we'll be looking at Kerbchem Industries and his/her stretchy tanks mod!</p>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="http://kerbalspaceport.com/stretchytanks/" title="" target="_blank">Stretchy Tanks</a></li>
    </li>
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    <h3>Mod Showcase</h3>
    <p> Todays short film features stretchy tanks and showcases the basics and use of the mod.</p>
    <ul>
    <li>Five fully adjustable fuel tank sizes ranging from half meter to full five meter tanks.</li>
    <li>Includes support for modular fuel tanks.</li>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/xPDxTV?feature=watch" target="_blank">PD</a></div>
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    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lKrxISOJqg8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
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    <h3> Through The Telescope </h3>
    <p>By: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives" target="_blank"> Pleborian </a></p>
    <p>Today I thought we could see something that is a bit different. Down in the bowels of YouTube if you search with a magnifying glass you can find some very creative people. AligatorGames is one of these and has created a brilliantly sad cinematic. Any landing you can walk away from has always been toted as a good thing, but how do the kerbals feel about this? I guess you'll just have to watch and find out.</p>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/EvilotionCR2?feature=mhee" target="_blank">AligatorGames</a></div>
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    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/1UKFaE7zC_8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
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    <h3>Editor's Notes</h3>
    <p> Don't forget to keep sending in your fan creations! We love to see them all and you deserve to all be featured but we just don't have the room and deciding what goes into the weekly is a task in and of itself sometimes! Simply send me, xpdxtv, a personal forum message with your link to a forum post, imgur picture or youtube video for a chance to be featured in the next weekly!
    <div align="center"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/yE81pyB.jpg"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/lVIKv1G.png" alt="Astronaut Complex Interior" /></a></div>
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    <p>
    <b>Brought to you by the KSP Media Group</b><br/>
    Author / Editor: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/xpdxtv" target="_blank">xPDxTV</a><br/>
    Reporter: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives" target="_blank">Pleborian</a><br/>
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    xPDxTV
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    <h2> August 13th, 2013 </h2>
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    <h3>KSP Headline</h3>
    <p> Today we get a sneak-peek into what R&D could potentially look like! </p>
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    <li>I would like to welcome Spootyman, Kofeyh and Nooby aboard the KSPTV Stream Team. There is only 1 application still under review but if you haven't made the team please try again next time.</li>
    <li><a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entry.php/809-Experimental-Applications-Open-Again" title="" target="_blank">KSP Experimental Applications</a> are once again open and will be looking primarily for Mac OSX, and Linux users for testing.</li>
    <li> Your weekly developer update. </li>
    <li> What would Kerbin be like if Kerbals had weapons? </li>
    <li> Thunder Aerospace enters life support? </li>
    <li> The progression of KSP in a chart made by the community! </li>
     
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    <h3>Developement Updates</h3>
    <h4>KSP Dev Team Updates</h4>
    <ul>
     
    <li><b>Felipe (Harvester)</b>: Work continues on the implementation of R&D. Very pleased with how it’s turning out. Today I got the R&D scenario module to start itself up with a proper initial state when starting a new game, so no need to hack the save files to test R&D systems anymore. Spent some time on a few dev tools last week, and they’ve already paid off. Being able to have the game tell you which parts are still unassigned to a tech node is invaluable. All in all, we’re making good steady progress, but there’s still a looooong way to go ahead of us.</li>
     
    <li><b>Rob (N3X15)</b>: Fun with routing, more fun with getting Spaceport 2’s filesystem working. Addon editing, creation and tagging is pretty well completed. Also messing around with youtube-styled jQuery-based tagging fields.</li>
     
    <li><b>Jim (Romfarer)</b>: The R&D GUI is starting to take shape. Most of the graphical elements are completed and we now have a working prototype that runs with the back-end currently in place. This is partly due to the new front-end vs back-end design we have set up where the two are much more loosely coupled than the last project, the crew management system.</li>

    <li><b>Chad (C7)</b>: I spent the last week testing and tuning the SAS, I also added more feedback to the UI in regards to what mode the SAS is in. So it should be clear exactly what it is doing now. Still testing the Unity upgrade, other than a few minor issues it’s going well. I’ll be working on sorting those out this week.</li>

    <li><b>Alex (aLeXmOrA)</b>: I’ve been working on the CheckforUpdates feature that the Launcher will be doing. If your KSP copy isn’t the latest one, you’ll be able to start the patcher from the Launcher to update it. Also, tweaked some visual effects of the UI buttons.</li>
     
    <li><b>Marco (Samssonart)</b>: Aside from my usual support duties I’m helping out with the Launcher, focusing on the game settings that will be modifiable through the Launcher</li>

    <li><b>Daniel (DanRosas)</b>: I finished the mockups for the Launcher and the settings screens. Also the respective assets for those screens. There’s only two pics missing, but I’m giving it some thought about their design. On the other hand, I’m getting somewhere with the Astronaut Complex backdrop, it’s looking fun. Once I have a more finished product I’ll share the image here. I’m doing it as a 3d scene in order to be able to use it in a future Kerbal short. </li>

    <li><b>Mike (Mu)</b>: Worked last week on the sub-assembly loading system for the editor. Made a good amount of progress on it, and will continue working on it this week. </li>

    <li><b>Ted (Ted)</b>: I've been making some further adjustments to plans here and there, making sure that Testing is going to run as smoothly as possible. Changed the Tracker a bit to make it much easier to use - for both Testers and Developers alike. Finally, I've also opened up Experimental Team applications for OSX and Linux players. </li>
     
    <li><b>Artyom (bac9)</b>: Working on a bunch of new content that will support the R&D features. In fact, I did the same on the previous week, sorry about missing the last weekly (damn time zones). First, I obviously have to create the R&D facility model itself, which is progressing nicely. After that, I have a huge bunch of content ahead of me, which will, erm, illustrate your progress through said research. I'm sure we'll show that a bit later. Speaking of the R&D facility, check my concept of it on the right. </li>

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    <p> Today we look at user 신형 김 and his cinematic style space station video. It does contain a few mods but overall I was impressed with his building aesthetics. </p>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpUUNsHXZafeLhYpE1hZi3A?feature=watch" target="_blank">신형 김</a></div>
    <br/>
    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/QbrQIJmBNac" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
     
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    <h3>KSP Mod Spotlight</h3>
    <p> Due to a failure of my powersupply and subsequent loss of my HDD I was not able to fully implement the mod spotlight changes I wanted to start. This week, however, we feature Thunder Aerospace Corporation and the Life Support Mod. This mod will allow you to simulate needing Air, Water and Food as well as waste such as C02 and will require you to supply the core needs of your kerbals.</p>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="http://kerbalspaceport.com/tac-life-support/" title="" target="_blank">TAC Life Support</a></li>
    </li>
    </ul>
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    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3>Mod Spotlight</h3>
    <p> Because of an unfortunately timed power supply and HDD crash i was not able to get a video up in time for this weeks mod showcase as the raw data was lost, however, not to be discouraged I will list the major features of this mod as I have had a chance to play with it and find it very cool.</p>
    <ul>
    <li>Kerbals require resources to live.</li>
    <li>Kerbals produce waste resources.</li>
    <li>Kerbals on EVA still use resources.</li>
    <li>Inactive manned vessels will still consume resources.</li>
    <li>Includes Hex Containers from Greys for Food.</li>
    <li>For more information head on over to the spaceport link provided above.</li>
    </ul>
     
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    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3> Through The Telescope </h3>
    <p>By: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives" target="_blank"> Pleborian </a></p>
    <p>Today I thought we could see something that is a bit different. Down in the <a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/forumdisplay.php/33-General-KSP-Discussion">KSP General</a> section of the forums there was laying in wait a user created chart showing the overall progress of KSP.
    Today's TTT draws its sights to Nachtwind. Nachtwind has created a near flow chart of every update and other related release information entailing the development of KSP as a whole. Nachtwind has said that they will continue work on the project so make sure you keep yourself up to date from time to time by checking it out.
    <div align="center"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/SyF2ecJ.png"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/8iwQVVf.png" alt="KSP Development Chart" /></a></div>
    </div>
     
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    <h3>Editor's Notes</h3>
    <p> Don't forget to keep sending in your fan creations! We love to see them all and you deserve to all be featured but we just don't have the room and deciding what goes into the weekly is a task in and of itself sometimes! Today we have a sneak-peek of Research and Development! This picture is very much still a work in progress and does not necessarily represent the final product.</p>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/MXoZHyo.png"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/BElJ5eu.png" alt="R&D Building Sketch" /></a></div>
     
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    <p>
    <b>Brought to you by the KSP Media Group</b><br/>
    Author / Editor: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/xpdxtv" target="_blank">xPDxTV</a><br/>
    Reporter: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives" target="_blank">Pleborian</a><br/>
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    xPDxTV
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    <h2> August 6th, 2013 </h2>
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    <h3>KSP Headline</h3>
    <p> I'm hoping to make some positive changes into how our mod showcasing works starting next week based upon feedback received from our viewers! </p>
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    <li>KSP-TV Broadcaster Applications have been reviewed and those of you that are being considered have been sent messages through the forums. Applications will open again at a later date.</li>
    <li> Your weekly developer update. </li>
    <li> What would Kerbin be like if Kerbals had weapons? </li>
    <li> Thunder Aerospace enters life support? </li>
    <li> Rock out with another look into the community! </li>

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    <h3>Developement Updates</h3>
    <h4>KSP Dev Team Updates</h4>
    <ul>

    <li><b>Felipe (Harvester)</b>: Picking up momentum again after a very welcome break last week. Started designing the Tech Tree for the upcoming Research & Development. Much too soon to get into detail about it, but it’s starting to look very interesting and cool. There will be a proper dev blog about it once it’s presentable. </li>

    <li><b>Rob (N3X15)</b>: HATE. HATE. HATE SPACEPORT. Re-engineering some of the form validation system so it works with the Markdown-compatible add-on fields. Evaluating how to install Varnish on the store server with minimal downtime. </li>

    <li><b>Jim (Romfarer)</b>: I am currently working on the Research & Development gui. What can i confirm at this time? It will have a tech tree with nodes, represent technology you can research. For every technology there will be a display telling you which parts you can unlock. </li>

    <li><b>Chad (C7)</b>: I spent the last week on vacation and had a good time visiting family. Upon returning to work Monday, I began testing Unity 4.2 as a potential upgrade for KSP. I’m also working on some adjustments and upgrades to SAS, based on player feedback from testing 0.21.1. </li>

    <li><b>Alex (aLeXmOrA)</b>: I realized that HTML Engine for Unity is not needed to develop the Launcher I’m working on. I set all the UI into the scene and started programming all the functionality. </li>

    <li><b>Daniel (DanRosas)</b>: I was working on the UI for the game launcher, tweaking the design, moving things, and such. There’s still one more screen left to do. I’m currently working on new concepts for the astronaut complex interior, to replace the grey background that we currently have. </li>

    <li><b>Mike (Mu)</b>: I also had a week’s holiday to recharge the mental batteries. This week I’m back to working on some new VAB/SPH editor upgrades. </li>

    <li><b>Ted (Ted)</b>: I’ve been continuing to refine the Testing Process further, looking at possible improvements to both the Team and the Bug Tracker. As well as helping to test out KSP’s Unity 4.2 upgrade with the QA Team. </li>

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    <h3>YouTube Spotlight</h3>
    <p> There were some very cool video submissions this week to the KSP Weekly. SqueegyMackoy stands out amongst the crowd with this brilliant Kerbals at War 2 video. You could say this video has explosive personality, as it will literally blow you away! </p>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/squeegymackoy" target="_blank">SqueegyMackoy</a></div>
    <br/>
    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CwiUbsq2q58" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>

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    <h3>KSP Mod Spotlight</h3>
    <p> Starting next week I would like to change how the mod showcase has worked based on viewer feedback. This week, however, we feature Thunder Aerospace Corporation and the fuel balancer mod. This mod will allow you to move fuel between all of your craft and is very intuitive.</p>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="http://kerbalspaceport.com/tac-fuel-balancer-v1-0/" title="" target="_blank">TAC Fuel Balancer</a></li>
    </li>
    </ul>
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    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3>Mod Spotlight</h3>
    <p> Starting next week I would like to feature individual interviews with the devs of their mods or, if unavailable, do an independant video about the mod in our spotlight. This week I'll post the key features of the TAC fuel balancer mod.</p>
    <ul>
    <li>Transfer a resource into a part, drawing an equal amount from each other part.</li>
    <li>Transfer a resource out of a part, transferring an equal amount into each other part.</li>
    <li>Enable balance mode to transfer a resource such that all parts are the same percentage full.</li>
    <li>Dump a resource out of a part. Note that the resource is lost, never to be found.</li>
    <li>Lock a part, so that none of the resource will be transferred into or out of the part.</li>
    <li>When still Prelaunch (or Landed): edit the amount of a resource loaded in a part. Works on all resources, even solid rocket fuel.</li>
    </ul>

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    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3> Through The Telescope </h3>
    <p>By: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives" target="_blank"> Pleborian </a></p>
    <p>There is always something to find within the fan-works section that is truly brilliant. Down in the <a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/forumdisplay.php/40-KSP-Fan-Works">KSP Fan Works</a> section of the forums are many of these hidden gems.
    Today's TTT draws its over-going gaze to Hizuk1. Hizuk has created a trailer style cinematic for KSP. I would like to note that the first 30 seconds or so doesn't have any sound and that it gets loud in a hurry so be careful with your volume levels.
    <div align="center"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/hizuk1" target="_blank">Hizuk1</a></div>
    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mzRzpo_h8vs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
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    <h3>Editor's Notes</h3>
    <p> You guys and gals of Kerbal Space Program, all of you Kerbanauts truly manage to make some very awesome fan creations! If you haven't been featured on the weekly for a fan creation of your own don't be discouraged keep sending those messages with links to your video, trailer, cinematic, animation, screen shot, artwork, 3d renders, everything! Send me your imgur, youtube, or forum links in a message on the forums.</p>

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    <b>Brought to you by the KSP Media Group</b><br/>
    Author / Editor: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/xpdxtv" target="_blank">xPDxTV</a><br/>
    Reporter: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives" target="_blank">Pleborian</a><br/>
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    bac9

     
    So, I figured I should start a dev blog about things I do, as at the moment there isn't much to read about the design side of Kerbal Space Program, apart from occasional dev blogs about planets. The most obvious thing to start with would be the space center update in 0.21. It was something that was much needed to be done since, erm, the second they were added into the game, as the old space center meshes had a host of problems. Let's detail them first. No, STOP. First and foremost I have to warn this would be a long read and a huge page to load as I have no restraint or sense of what's appropriate for a dev blog (EDIT: He really doesn't.). Now we can start. I'm dead serious though, this will be long.
     
    The Issues Let's recount the issues that were present in the old content.
    First, the polycount. While old buildings were seemingly simple in their shape, they were modeled using some techniques like boolean extrusions which did not work out too well for their polycount. The most problematic of the objects was the the tracking center, with all those trusses on the back side of the dish, and the old Space Planes Hangar (SPH) coming in second. While polygons don't have as big an impact on performance as it's widely believed (I'll explain what does a bit later), wasting them still isn't nice.
    Second, the material count, and subsequently, the amount of textures old models were using was problematic. Now that isn't nice. Why? There are things called draw calls, which are portions of information sent from the CPU to your GPU describing what to render. And the thing is, what you're seeing in any given frame isn't being sent to the GPU in one chunk. There is a multitude of factors that break everything into hundreds and potentially thousands of separate calls. If you want to render a textureless cube without lighting, that can be done with just one draw call. If you want to use a diffuse texture under simple ambient light, it would be two drawcalls: one for the geometry and texturing, and one for shading. Want to use a normal map? That's another two heavy draw calls. Want to use transparency? Add another one. Should the object cast shadows and receive shadows? Add two more! Now, guess what happens if an object is using 20 materials? The amount of draw calls adds up extremely quickly then, and your CPU can only send so much and your GPU can only receive so many before things start to slow down. Old buildings were using a multitude of materials, which, unfortunately, weren't used with a great effect. For example, the old Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) interior used 16 materials (which wasn't even noticeable from surface resolution or material variety).
    For those of you unfamiliar with this term, materials are essentially parent entities to the textures. They are containing shader selections, texture selections for slots provided by a shader, and various parameters provided by a shader, like shininess or opacity. An example of a material would be "Metal" with "Bumped Specular" shader. With two texture maps (diffuse/specular and normal maps) requested by that shader and depicting metal. In simple cases, the word can be interchangeable with the texture, as no one usually cares whether you're talking about a material with one diffuse texture of just about that texture.
    Third, the object count. Each model has to be drawn separately. For example. having a building consisting of five models, is better than having a building consisting of half a hundred (I'm leaving it to you to imagine how draw calls are multiplied in that case). Well, guess what, the old VAB interior is consisting of dozens of separate models, and some other objects were no better off.
    Then, the visual style. Aforementioned wouldn't be as much of a problem if those buildings looked rad, but alas. Here are some issues with them:

      
    ^ As a side note: most of the images there and from now on are clickable thumbnails that will lead you to high-res originals. Click them.

    Buildings were using vastly disproportionate elements, like glass industrial lamps on the VAB clocking three meters across, randomly scaled doors and 10 meter-high observation windows. Elements lacking function added just for the sake of filling space with something, in the vain of "greeble" used to cover surfaces of sci-fi ships. Unsatisfying overall quality from an architectural standpoint: problems with composition and color, lack of consistent elements like window and door systems, lack of ventilation, questionable structure, surfaces lacking contrast between high and low frequency detail. And finally, the quality of texturing. Uh-oh.

    That's all I can remember off the bat. Now, I should say I'm not trying to bash the developer who originally did these models (and has long left the team), as making so much content was still a hard and long job that provided KSP with valuable placeholders to ride with for a long time. Stuff like that only deserves bashing and shaming if we as developers are convinced that nothing can be wrong and nothing should be changed. Thankfully that's not the case, and replacing those objects was long planned for. So it needed to happen. Now, how can you go about it?

    First, there was an extremely inconsistent texel  density (which means that texture resolution varied wildly across the surfaces, with crystal-clear high-resolution metal seen right next to a muddy concrete stretched across hundreds of meters). Ideally, you should get exactly the same resolution per area everywhere, 512x512 per 8x8 meters, for example (that translates to 2x2m for 128x128 textures and so forth): that hugely helps to make everything look more consistent, and makes MIP mapping nicer. Sometimes it's unavoidable, like with the terrain system, but there is no excuse not to make building models consistent in themselves. Second, the quality of textures. Normal maps, if used, were hastily generated by an automatic filter with poor results. Diffuse textures contained puzzling detail. I vividly remember, for example, a photo of some small electric control panel stretched onto the whole height of an old launch tower, or strange green boxes each VAB "shelf" was stuffed with, with dials so large a kerbal could fit into them! Some stuff evidently used non-proportional transformations. No attempt was made to build a consistent color palette that works together in interiors, each texture was created without referencing others, which leads to a chaotic, unpleasant color set without any nice contrasts for the eye. Not a single specular map was used.  
    Decisions, decisions Okay, so now we know what needs to be fixed. What should I make, then? First building I needed to make was the new VAB. But a place where tall stuff is being built is an awfully generic description, so I needed ideas.
    The old VAB gave me a hint. It loosely reminded me of something real, but I wasn't sure what that was. I Googled "VAB", and sure enough, found the original iconic NASA building from Cape Canaveral. The old VAB took the idea of door design from it, but not much else. What were some additional references beyond one of the most iconic buildings in the history of space programs? Well, there are some other things. Maybe the VAB should be more sci-fi looking? Or maybe it should be a ramshackle hut built from wood, scrap and duct tape, because it would be "so kerbal"? Or maybe the red-grey-white "style" of old buildings should be faithfully followed? Well, I don't think so, and let me build the case why.
    Style of the old buildings. Well, two things about it. First of all, there already exists an established art style within KSP, and it has nothing to do with old buildings: the style of stock parts. It is defined by a few things. First, it is depicting modern pieces of technology like engines and electric equipment, built fairly competently and cleanly, with slight exaggeration of proportions. Second, it usually ignores too small high-frequency detail in favor of nice bulky minimal shapes. Third, it favors hand-painted detail and solid fills instead of gritty photo-sourced textures, and is using a particular color palette of grays, browns and whites, with occasional accents in other colors. It's a very consistent style, and it works well, fitting the characters and the world together. Now, the old buildings have nothing to do with it, actively clashing with the aforementioned things. They are using gritty photo-sourced textures one second and enormously stretched abstract fills another. They are using colors completely disconnected from the parts and don't have hand-painted detail. Most importantly, they are anything but sensible modern-age buildings. I have already explained a bit earlier all the flaws their style has, making it fairly bad choice if you want the game to be beautiful and consistent. With that I allowed myself to completely ignore the style of all old buildings and not reference a single thing from them. Onward to the next candidate!
    Sci-fi! But Artyom, “How about making B9 Aerospace themed hangar with faceted chrome walls, futuristic architecture and surgical lighting?� Erm, no thanks. Stock parts are very obviously depicting a different technological era, so something that is consistent with them must be made. Modern era architecture is a very interesting place anyway, with tons of styles, interesting structural solutions and lots of fancy props you can use. So nope, no sci-fi, at least not until (and if) we get tech levels implemented. Tech levels could go both ways though, maybe I'll make a tiny garage-like VAB where your first rocket is made, as it makes little sense to have a NASA-scale facility in the beginning. But that's far into the future. So, next one.
    So, we are left with the realization that using a real reference for the VAB is a good choice. Though, replicating it precisely isn't really a good way. So I have paid close attention to the existing art style of KSP that is most exhibited in the spacecraft parts that are available, and created a building inspired by the NASA VAB with some important differences in mind:
    So, with reference chosen, execution style set and with new ideas in mind, VAB modeling started.

    No gritty photo-textures: Every texture is painted manually and lacks rough noisy definition, instead relying on exaggerated highlights, seams and solid color fills. No overwhelming high-frequency detail like wires and overpopulated rooftops: I have only left clean, clearly defined props like bulky HVAC systems. Proportions were changed to fit for Kerbals, with door sizes, floor & window heights and ladders created accordingly. More dense, self-sufficient composition: A real VAB is surrounded with dozens of buildings. I have condensed it into a solid structure that looks better as a defined element of a space center. Doors: The original VAB could hold 4 rockets assembled simultaneously. In KSP, we only need one. But why cut the remaining 3/4th of space? So I give all volume inside of the tower to one giant assembly hall, with the door of the fitting size sitting on one side. Symmetry is boring. Why leave the doors on both sides? So I have replaced one side with a giant window that allows us to spice the variety up and make the lighting in the interior very interesting.  
    Building the building
    So, first, you need to decide whether to make an interior or exterior model first. As the VAB is an example of the industrial, functionalist architecture, the form of it is dictated by function. Therefore, it makes sense to begin with an interior that will contain stuff like structural supports, and then move onto the exterior with confidence your shapes represent the contents of the building properly. Now, when you don't have a good knowledge of things such as architectural standards, typical proportions, structural support types and so on, it's good to have some sort of reference, preferably photography. Well, even if you do (I, for instance, have spent years and years making models of the rusty buildings for unofficial Stalker mods and memorized tons of Soviet construction standards in the process - not that it will help much here). Aimlessly wandering is no good. So I've searched for interior photos of NASA VAB and, while, obviously, its interior proportions are very different (the real building is housing four assembly halls instead of one), it gave me a few good ideas.

    The first thing you can notice is it basically has two layers. There is, of course, a boring solid vertical wall, but before it, with a significant offset giving space to the floor areas, stands a layer of structural supports comprised of repeating square sections. That's a very good feature. Overall, the use of modular geometry is very widespread in game-oriented modeling. Every single game from Bethesda, Valve, Epic and many other AAA dev teams is using this approach. Working with a grid and compatible elements is a very useful trick that allows you to save time, have lots of detail, and leave a lot of room for revisions. So it was a no-brainer to use, especially when I was unsure what scale would work best, whether the height should be 50, 60 or 100 meters, and so on - so the ability to quickly rework things was crucial. So, first, I created a modular set of those structural supports aligned onto the 8x8m grid:

    These meshes have to be extremely optimized as they will be reused hundreds of times over as floors grow wider and stack higher. One of the tricks here is not to create any faces on the back, which faces the wall where players won't be able to look.

    Next, I build vertical stacks out of that part set. In the end, I decided on a 96 meter-high assembly hall, which is twice the height of the original VAB interior. That makes precisely twelve 8 meter-high floors. To spice things up on the horizontal direction, I replaced two stacks with recessed shafts for elevator platforms. So, everything on the structural layer is built using these three basic vertical elements:

    Now, time to make the walls, floors, left/right/top/down pieces surrounding the supports, and basic shapes filling the floors behind the structural supports. Those are, again, comprised of repeating modular components: top and down sections comprised of two types of 8 meter-wide "lips" (one simple and one with elevator shaft opening), vertical borders built from 16 meter-high sections, three basic shapes of "boxes" that populate the floors and are used together to make something different on each level, and so on. Ah, and I can't forget ladders and railings. Ladders are, again, modular objects comprised of 4 meter-high sections, and railings are sub-objects assigned to floor objects. Also, one of the higher floors has double the height, 16 meters, to add more variety to the looks:

    Next, it was time to decide on the horizontal dimensions and close the interior. As my walls are 64 meters-wide, that became the length of the floor. The width of it was set instead to 48 meters, as a square floor would look lame from an architectural standpoint, and would require a pretty ridiculous door width to be used. Some more space adds up from recessed galleries surrounding the floor. Then, a bright idea appeared: why not ditch the symmetrical layout of the old VAB? Having two identical doors is quite a boring sight, especially when there is no point in another one as there is only one spacecraft and one launch pad involved at a time. And why not add a huge window in place of it? As mentioned earlier, it is assembled from 8x8 meter blocks of three types (opaque wall, windows themselves and the gate), then covered with one layer of structural supports adhering to the same grid, and covered with modular walkways and ladders. That window construction allowed for much more interesting lighting and greatly improved the look of the VAB. And it also allowed for a very logical addition – the doors can be closed for prolonged periods of time, while the translucent wall lets light in no matter the weather nor time of year. Not to mention, completely artificial lighting is going to leave your space agency some chilling electric bills if you want to reliably flood all that enormous volume with the doors closed and pitch black darkness rising inside. So, sunlight it is! Next, I added a roof with a forest of horizontal structural supports (again, everything is modular to allow easy altering). It's a bit boring to have a dark and flat ceiling, so I decide to add four windows there, which comes in very handy later when I will need ideas on roof decoration. And finally, we have a structure that's starting to shape up as a usable interior scene:

    Time to glue it together. Next, I'm making a set of modular props. The building needs some clutter, lots of small objects like crates, lights, machinery, color accents to liven it up, so it's a very important part of work that's as hard and demanding as making a whole set of new rocket parts. In the end, I decide on this set:

    It has multiple varieties of wooden and metal crates scaled to be reminiscent of part sizes (they have to be housed somewhere, right?), unpacked empty sections of 1.25 meter and 2.5 meter standard hulls, some machinery, a large set of various transport and service vehicles (smaller ones can ride elevator platforms, large ones deliver parts from outside), and some floodlights (not depicted there). As with modular structural supports, it's extremely important to keep props as optimized as possible, as they will be reused over and over and piled into huge groups. Once props are done, I make a few separate objects containing all the clutter, comprised of a few hundred of those props:

    Once those are done, I combine them together. Phew, finally.

    Ah, nope, we're not done. I have made those screenshots by disassembling the final model, so everything above was textured. I didn't have the luxury when I first modeled that interior, as everything was white and empty. So, how was texturing done?
     
     
    You're texturing it;
    Those of you familiar with 3D modeling are probably pretty disturbed by this point because they have recognized the familiar viewport and UI and know what software I used. They have that crawling sensation under their skin. Oh god, that's right, it's SketchUp. Why the hell would anyone use that for any serious work and, most importantly, how the hell would you texture anything in it when proper texturing tools don't even exist there? Well...

    I'll be doing a separate devblog on the subject of using SketchUp for game development later, so let's just focus on a short version.
    First, SketchUp has indeed gathered a reputation of a problematic choice for 3d modeling, with models of abysmal quality inhabiting 3D Warehouse and horror stories of conversion attempts flooding forums of many game engines. SketchUp has a reputation of a software that's only capable of producing inherently broken, unoptimized and dirty geometry that's unfit for use as game art. Well, surprise, that's untrue. The problem lies in the fact that SketchUp is just so well designed and so easy to start with that lots of users jump into modeling straight away, prior to learning about any optimization techniques, general modeling rules, and so on (which is generally not a bad thing unless it involves someone else trying to use the resulting models). So when they make e.g. a house model, they rely on horrifying boolean extrusions, ignore surface normals and edge smoothing, then cover the result with some ultra-lossy JPEG juice from standard material library and publish that work to aforementioned 3D Warehouse where Mr. John Brown, your esteemed and imaginary game developer and professional 3d artist, finds this horror and dies from heart stroke.

    But it doesn't have to be like that! SketchUp is a modeling package just like the others, and all the general rules of 3D modeling are still applied there. You must keep an eye on surface orientation, you must optimize your model, keep neatly organized component hierarchy, avoid boolean operations, etc. The program won't magically solve all these issues for you. And once you work cleanly, you will start getting clean results. All models in the B9 Aerospace Pack (with the exception of the last engines modeled by Taverius) were made in SketchUp, and it isn't all that obvious. Every single building and detail of the interior in the latest update were done there too. Again, I'll expand on the process later. Okay, SketchUp is convenient and nice, - for now, let's switch to a more important question of texturing.
    The old VAB interior was using 16 materials, which, as we have already discussed earlier, was not very nice for performance, especially considering the amount of separate meshes there. The new one is using three:


    Those textures are called unwraps and contain every single unique surface of the model. Every one who has used SketchUp also knows that this type of texture mapping is completely absent from it, requiring an advanced editor like Unwrap UVW from 3ds Max, which just doesn't exist. What the hell? Well, a few years ago I was particularly lazy to leave the cozy interface of SU for another unwrap, so I came up with an exotic workaround that allowed me to make textures and mapping like that without using external packages.

    A large texture atlas for all main surfaces like walls, supports, floor, windows, ladders, etc. Another, smaller texture atlas for small props like trucks, crates, lamps, toolboxes, etc. (additionally, it's reused in the SPH interior scene) And a transparent texture for spotlights and other fake light sprites used to enhance the scene (also reused in SPH interior scene).
    Essentially, I set up a bounding box, manually rip every single surface I need to be present on the layout from the model, condense them into the smallest possible layout with some Tetris-like exercises, and render the resulting mess with 2d camera in wireframe mode, into the resolution I want (for the main VAB layout that was 2048x2048).
    Here is another example, for another, less complex model.

    And, if you are still not asleep, here is the layout I have used for those trucks and crates:

    After getting that out of the way, we drop the model with the textures into Unity and get a lovely result that looks just like those screenshots in the previous weekly.
    OH WAIT WE DON'T.
     
    THE RIDE NEVER ENDS Let's take a deep breath and look back at old VAB & SPH interiors for a moment. Notice anything bad about the lighting specifically?

    Well, the lighting is less than ideal. Here is why:

    But what are our options? Changing the renderer to deferred is tempting as it theoretically allows an unlimited amount of per-pixel light sources, but that is not an option because KSP is using a multi-camera setup that will never work with it properly. Settling for the mediocre current lighting won't do either. Well, there is one more way. Aren't VAB and SPH interiors almost completely static, with gates always open, outdoors predefined, and walls unmovable? Well, then we can cheat out of using real-time lighting completely: by precalculating some extremely fancy lighting and storing it in the lightmaps. It's an old and proven technique that was constantly evolving from the beginning when games couldn't use real-time lighting, growing and improving alongside it. While some engines like CE3 opt to have completely real-time lighting, many others are relying on precomputed lighting, notable examples being UE3 and Frostbite. As we aren't developing a Martian rebellion simulator with building destruction (for now, at least), and both the geometry and lighting conditions are predefined and static, it's a fairly good option.

    The lighting consists of a directional light source (faked sun) and an ambient light (level of brightness all surfaces get even when unlit). Nice combo for Quake 1, but not really something that's showcasing geometry nicely: surfaces are only being lit from one side, so half of the geometry detail remains invisible without being highlighted differently. A properly lit scene should have every single point illuminated from at least two directions to create a good interplay of light on surfaces. So, maybe that could be solved by adding a second directional light? No it cannot. Look at those shadows! Those are the best shadows our renderer can offer, and they are alright for stuff like being casted from Kerbals onto the grass. There are a few glaring, unacceptable limitations to traditional shadows that make them unsuitable here. First, they are perfectly sharp, without any penumbra being simulated. Second, they are stencil, flat, completely monotonous fills the geometry gets flooded with - which has almost nothing to do with how real shadows look. This means that the ceiling of the room will never be fading softly into the dark while lower floors are enjoying bright sunlight with faint shadows: everything gets the same masked fill. That just won't work! Next, the amount of lights needs to be improved. Right now we can only use up to 8 per-pixel light sources, everything over the limit then falls back to hideous per-vertex lighting mode. Lower quality settings are only using one per-pixel light, or none at all. One of those limited light sources is already occupied: it's the light that has to illuminate parts added to the scene. Now, good looking interior needs rich lighting, potentially hundreds of light sources. Goog luck trying to decorate everything with just a few. All and all, you will end up with a gray boring room at best, and with messy, jagged, vertex-lit room at worst. Old rooms were already reaching those limits. And finally, there is a complete lack of proper global illumination, ambient occlusion, radiosity, translucent surfaces and other important effects, which leaves us with a completely flat picture that's not just unrealistic, it also fails to showcase the geometry properly. That leaves us to guess whether crates are touching the floor or floating ten meters into the air above it.

    Unity has a very powerful and easy to use integrated solution for precomputed lighting, which I put to use. First, you need to set up all light sources you want to be baked into the lightmap. No restrictions on anything this time. So, I have gone bananas with detail, adding wide variety of lights onto the floors, around static vehicles, using around a hundred of lights to simulate translucency of windows, and so on.

    Then, add a variety of parameters like strength of global illumination, amount of bounces, lightmap resolution and other things that need to be configured. All of that work takes the whole day in the best case, and we finally were able to press the "Bake" button. So of course, that meant I need to watch my poor PC choke for about half an hour while managing insanely complex calculations. There is a good reason why that kind of lighting quality is not available at real time. But in the end, the result is worth it:


    Although guess what? I'm still not satisfied. Lightmaps are limited by resolution, which you need to restrict yourself with to save the memory of the players. I have used only two 1024x1024px maps for the VAB and one 2048x2048px map for the SPH. Going higher was unreasonable, even though I wanted smaller detail like tiny corridor lamps and nice detailed floodlights. Thankfully, there is a solution for that:

    I'm imitating small light sources and volumetric light with the sprite sheet I showed earlier! That allowed me to use high-resolution detail. The only problem is every single sprite will have the same intensity, opacity and color, which isn't nice. A solution for that was found too. I created a looped animation which overrides the parameters for each sub-object of the assembly separately, turning one array to blue, toning down opacity of another object to 50%, and so forth. The same animation also allowed me to add nice subtle effects like flickering floodlights.
    Phew. Are we done yet?
    Almost. One last thing is we have a few dynamic, moving objects in the interior scenes, such as, parts, Kerbals walking around and animated trucks. They can't use lightmaps, and they can't be affected by anything depicted in lightmaps of the surrounding environment, but we would really like them to be grounded into the scene. So, we create a shadow casting light source, like the one used in our old VAB and SPH. But this time, we set it to affect only the objects I listed above. The one problem with this is shadows can't be properly casted onto the lightmapped floor. So here is a little trick we used: we created a plane situated a tiny bit above the floor, with the special shader Felipe Falanghe (HarvesteR) wrote that handles it. The shader makes the plane completely invisible, but receives all shadows onto itself, thus leaving all lightmapped geometry free from any interference:

    Another thing we worked on was exterior lighting. Old scenes had a directional light acting as a sun, so terrain stretching into the horizon was evenly lit and shadows of the building were coarse and sharp. We didn't want such a view to spoil things outside of our beautiful interior, so another trick is used. Instead of uniformly distributed directional sunlight I create a spotlight, much similar to ones you have in the part list, but with much higher intensity and extreme effective range, around 1000 meters. This spotlight is then used to illuminate the exterior outside of the doors. The circular nature of it is not visible with the very narrow field we have available looking through the doors, so the whole thing looks like real sun is producing a very soft shadow of the building and the light is softly fading away into the fog in the distance:

    And with that, finally, we are done with interiors!
     
    I don't want to go out As I have mentioned before, as we have an industrial/functionalist building, the shape of the exterior is defined by the shape and function of the interior. So, first, I built a rough shape that will enclose the interior while loosely resembling the NASA VAB:

    It's very easy to get stuck at this point, because there is too much you can do and it's extremely easy to end in a place similar to the old buildings, spending your time covering surfaces with meaningless extrusions and trying to come up with detail for the sake of detail. To avoid that, we wanted to establish rules. The more rules and standardized systems you have, the better. They will guide you and your object will start taking shape.


    Let's take a bit closer look at the materials and props I have used.

    The very first rules was the grid: I decided every single thing in the model had to be snapped to the grid with the step of 1 meter. Then, I decided on the texel density: it would be 64px per meter. This level had to be consistent across every single surface for the buildings to look good both from afar and up close. From texel density requirements arose textures. The most optimal choice that allowed most varied detail for reasonable file size was using 512x512 textures with an 8x8 meter area. Some were smaller, though, as monotonous surfaces like asphalt can get away with using small textures without noticeable tiling. Next, you need to create guidelines for yourself to govern the sizes, offsets and types of windows and doors. What greatly helped there was the strict grid and seams established by tile textures. From those guidelines, you can go off to create a set of ready-to-use windows, doors, grates, gates, ladders and combined objects that you can quickly place around the building without wasting time on remodeling each time. And finally, you need a system of versatile props so you won't have to drag yourself into modeling meaningless greeble whenever you need high-frequency detail. For me it was a set of HVAC objects. As you remember, old buildings weren't particularly optimized in terms of textures and materials, so I made it a point to use as few materials as efficiently as possible. First and foremost, that meant creating textures that could be used for multiple buildings, not just the VAB. So, here are the materials used for every exterior building model:

    I decided to use an approach similar to one found in Valve levels, where you are working on a clean grid with tiled textures that have strictly defined real sizes. It's possible to push everything further into, let's say, three materials, but I opted for a sensible compromise. Storing everything in a single texture wouldn't have allowed to use the same, almost FPS-like resolution on walls, and would have necessitated much higher polycounts because of how mapping of texture atlases works. For example, I would have been forced to split VAB wall into hundreds of separate squares to translate the tiles onto the surface. With my setup, two polygons are often enough.
    With efficient and quick texture mapping tools in SketchUp, it's easy to start texturing before you're even finished with geometry, which, when you have grid-adherent textures like those, helps you to come up with ideas for the shapes. You set extrusion borders to match tile seams, place windows within tile rows and so on. Next, you need some props. Vertical walls have high-frequency detail covered by walls and windows, so it was the roof that was the most glaringly empty surface. It was especially important as many players like to land onto the building roofs and otherwise explore them, so some good detail was needed there. After some thinking, creating a set of HVAC props was the most obvious choice. So, that's what I created, and again, with the same optimized atlas texturing that allowed the use of only one texture for lots of different objects, thus saving drawcalls and memory.



    Then we have the doors, windows, stairs and grates mapped with another texture atlas you saw above.

    Are we done yet? Almost there. As the exterior is forced to work with fully dynamic lighting, it can't resort to lightmaps and precomputed lighting for fancy ambient occlusion. So, I came up with another solution: blended decals! Mike Geelan (Mu) wrote a set of great decal shaders (diffuse, additive, multiply) which I have used for a few things, most important of those being decals imitating a basic ambient occlusion.



    And with that, we are finally, finally done with both exteriors and interiors. Or are we?
     
    Please stop No. While buildings themselves are done, there are few more things needed to make a proper scene.
    First, we need to create surrounding ground models with pathways, lawns and roads for each building, because leaving a building right in the middle of terrain surface is bad for texel density consistency. It's nice when the ground surrounding the building has the same texture resolution as the walls that go into it, even if you have to move onto inherently less-detailed terrain a bit further.

    To liven the roads up a bit we need to somehow paint stuff like line markings on them. Obviously that can't be done over the asphalt texture itself, which is just a small square that gets repeated thousands of times over those varied shapes. Initially I have intended to use decals, like ones used on vertical surfaces of the buildings for AO and highlights such as the ones used on the SPH floor for all those lines. But exterior ground surface has one important difference: it's being observed from insane range of distances, from extreme close ups when Kerbals traverse the place on foot to dozens of kilometers in flight. Tests, though, have demonstrated that writing a decal shader that would be reliably sorted properly over that whole range is nearly impossible.

    So something different had to be used. Our solution was to make cutouts in the road mesh and fill them with modeled markings using a simple diffuse texture. No transparency and no sorting issues this way at a cost of few hundred additional polygons:

    Next, we need the Crawlerway to connect the VAB to the launch pad. While serving no functional role at the moment, it's an important model for the space center to look complete, and leaving an old ugly decal was not an option. The Crawlerway was molded by a few obvious requirements. It had to fit the VAB, it had to fit the launch pad that was modeled without any knowledge of a new VAB, and it had to have minimal depth-sorting issues. In the end, the compromise between those requirements gave birth to this model which, I must add, haven't required even one additional texture to be created:

    Now, we have only one final problem left. While the space center looks good during the daytime, it looks quite strange at night without exhibiting any sign of life in the pitch black windows. How about lighting it up? Thankfully, a solution exists - emissive textures and animations! First, I needed to draw a mask that will show which areas of the relevant textures you want to ignore the lighting and stay bright. Then, I created an animation that turned the effect on and off in a loop:

    And finally, Mike (Mu) wrote a script that used that animation and, similar to how heat animations on engines work, forced the space center to use certain places of the animation depending on the time of day. With that done, the space center finally lit up at night. Now, there are limitations to this approach. All emissive effect does is change the appearance of certain parts of a texture. You don't get glow showing up outside the shape of an object, you don't get flares (those are all separate effects that have to be coded additionally), but most importantly, nothing gets illuminated when you get close to those windows, because emissive textures are not light sources, much like in every other game you see illuminated windows in. Unfortunately, using real light sources for windows is completely cost-prohibitive, even on deferred renderers, not to mention the forward rendering we are using where even a dozen of per-pixel lights being displayed simultaneously is a rare occurrence. Area lights and true light-emitting materials are, unfortunately, effects that can only be properly achieved with more advanced, next-gen technology like UE4, and you'll have to wait for something like that to appear in games for a few more years. We have plans for more night time effects though, in particular adding a flare system for the runway lights and warning lights on top of the buildings. It will render unlit sprites that will face the camera and sort above other geometry, which will finally be an effect that's not constrained by bounds of building models and will be visible from far away. Until then, using emissive materials and animation will do and livens up the space center quite nicely.

    One other interesting bit was the tracking center. The most notable thing about it is the beautiful animated dishes that were modeled by Chad Jenkins (C7) and are controlled by another script written by Mu: they randomly select a target in the sky, track it for a while, then move onto the next. Inspired by timelapses of real radar arrays, that was really great touch. As mentioned previously, my input there consisted of making the central control building, the ground plane, and the texture for the dishes.

    And with that, we can finally conclude the development of the space center.
     
    Wow, it's over? Yeah. So, the space center is complete and ready for use. While I had to drop some of the details like SPH interior and SPH/crew/tracking buildings' exterior creation (I'm sure you're thankful I did), I believe all of this should offer a fairly complete understanding of our development process for this new content. It’s a very complicated process involving many major hurdles, hence the development time required for it. I think it was worth it and hope you liked the results!

    What's next? Well, I'm sure I'll find  something to do.
    For now, have a good day or enjoy a nap (admit it, you want to).

    HarvesteR
    Hi,

    I'm glad to announce we've just released the 0.21.1 Revision Patch for KSP.

    This patch addresses some of the most critical issues found on the 0.21 update. Most importantly, it fixes a big issue where you could end up stuck in the Editor scenes, due to the Launch and Exit button becoming unresponsive; and also fixes the new SAS, which wasn't holding attitude like it should have been.

    Here's the changelog:


    ==================================== v0.21.1

    Bug Fixes and Tweaks:
    * Removed some unused assets from KSP/Parts.
    * Fixed an issue with some scenery meshes that could cause bits of the UI to become unresponsive in some cases (mainly in the VAB and SPH).
    * Tweaked some object scales slightly.
    * Tweaked the ocean color at sea level on Kerbin (was way too dark).
    * Fixed an issue that would cause lag while moving parts around the editor scenes if too many crews were hired at the same time.
    * Fixed an issue with the new SAS not properly maintaining attitude. Should be much better now.
    * Tweaked some parameters on the SAS to make it more responsive.



    We've also changed a few other details about the SAS: Now, all command pods, be them probes or capsules, enable SAS for the vessel. Not all of them are able to apply torque on their own though, much like it's always been with the old system.

    We've re-tuned the SAS to get a sharper response as well. The issue we found with it was a simple one but it had some very far-reaching implications. The new SAS releases the attitude hold when you apply input, so you can still control the ship with it on, but an issue on the logic for that was causing the attitude lock to not set very well, which resulted in it drifting off target.

    As always, you can get the latest update through the KSPStore, the Patcher, or get auto-updated if you're on Steam.

    (If Steam hasn't updated yet, try shutting it down and restarting. That usually causes it to refresh all apps)

    Important Note:
    * Do mind that as with any new release, you shouldn't expect mods to work with the new version. We strongly recommend doing a clean reinstall of your game on each new release.


    Happy Launchings!

    Cheers

    HarvesteR
    Hi again,

    I'm very happy to announce that we've just released the 0.21 update for KSP!

    As you all probably know, this update was our first to focus mainly in Career Mode. We've still got a long way to go with that, but I can't tell you how satisfying it is to finally see progress in this part of the game, after over two years of working on the sandbox.




    Here are the main features for this update:

    * Revised Flight-End scene flow.
    In preparation for Career gameplay, we've redesigned the way flights are ended. Gone is the 'End Flight' button in the Pause Menu, cause of many a tale of accidental space station deletion. Now, you'll either get to return to the Space Center (as before), or when applicable, Revert to an earlier state (to launch or to the editors).

    * New Space Center Scene.
    The most underdeveloped part of the game finally gets its much deserved overhaul, featuring new models for nearly all the facilities, plus a couple of new ones as well. Keep on reading for more details on them.

    * The Astronaut Complex Facility.
    Another huge feature in the making, the Astronaut Complex is a new building at the Space Center, that gives you an overview of all your available victims brave explorers, and lets you recruit new ones from a list of applicants.

    * Crew Management
    Along with the Astronaut Complex, this adds the ability to select the crew for a vessel before launch (from the launch sites or from the editors). Pick from the list of available crewmembers, and assign them to any (yes, any) part on the vessel.

    * New VAB and SPH Interiors.
    The insides of the construction facilities are also completely re-done, the models are not only vastly better-looking than before, they're far more efficient as well, so there's no performance tradeoff here.

    * PSystem.
    This was one of the biggest code overhauls we've ever pulled off. Now, instead of having everything duplicated in each of the game's scenes, all common elements like the scenery, game logic, ambience and the planetarium are created once and get reused. This means the world you see at the space center is now exactly the same as the one you see in flight, and in the tracking station. It also means much slicker transitions between scenes, as we don't have to respawn everything again.

    * Overhauled SAS Flight Control Sytem.
    Veteran players (and new ones alike) will be happy to know we’ve done away with the old Stability Augmentation System (or Sickness Avoidance Solution or whatever you want to call it) we had, which caused more flight stability problems than solutions sometimes, and re-built it completely from scratch. We can’t overstate how much of an improvement over the previous system this is.

    * Much Improved terrain on Kerbin, the Mun, and other places.
    New procedurally generated craters on the Mun, low hills around Kerbin, and a lot of other tweaks and optimization make for a much more interesting landscape to fly around and <s>crash into</s> land at.

    * A Completely Redesigned Website.
    Alex's secret project is finally revealed! Check it out.


    And of course, the usual battery of bug fixes and tweaks. Here's the changelog (there are actually more changes than this, these are only the most noteworthy):


    ==================================== v0.21.0


    New:


    * Space Center Scene:
    - The Space Center scene now uses the same terrain as in flight.
    - Time now passes in the Space Center scene, and day/night is consistent with in-flight.
    - The game terrain persists across scene transitions, making loading scenes much faster.


    * Construction:
    - Completely overhauled the interior models for the VAB and SPH buildings, complete with animated trucks and cargo lifts.
    - All-new exterior models for the VAB, SPH and Tracking Station.
    - New Astronaut Complex building.
    - Added a description field where you can write up a few lines to describe your space-faring contraptions.


    * Crew Management:
    - It is now possible to assign crew manually to missions before launch, both from the Construction Facilities and from Launch Sites.
    - Added completely new Launch Dialogs on the Runway and Launchpad at the Space center.
    - The new Astronaut Complex dialog allows you to hire crews from a list of Applicants, and view the status of all your crewmembers.
    - Revised the crew handling game logic, for a much more reliable and robust system.


    * SAS Modules:
    - Rewrote the SAS control logic from the ground up.
    - SAS is now enabled for the entire vessel, and requires actuators like winglets, RCS or others to actually have an effect.
    - Repurposed the old SAS modules are now Reaction Wheel Modules, that apply torque while consuming electricity.
    - The new SAS logic allows applying manual input while SAS is on, letting you set the ship's attitude without having to constantly toggle it.


    * Procedural Terrain:
    - Added a new module to generate craters procedurally on the Mun.
    - Largely revised Kerbin's terrain to produce much more interesting mountains, hills, valleys and coastlines.


    * Flight Re-Flow:
    - Removed the physically-impossible "End Flight" button.
    - Added new options to "Revert" a mission back to launch or to construction.
    - Added new 'Recover' button on the Tracking Station, to allow recovering a vessel (as opposed to Terminating it) when possible.
    - Recovering vessels makes its crew available again, while Terminating kills them.
    - The 'Space Center' button now allows you to leave flight at any time, warning when necessary about saving restrictions.


    * Progress Tracking:
    - The game now tracks your progress as you play, providing essential data for the upcoming Career Mode features.
    - Progress data is (optionally) uploaded to our servers,


    * Misc:
    - Improved the in-game shadowing to enable shadows at much larger distances.
    - Added several new parts from the KSPX pack as stock content.




    Bug Fixes and Tweaks:
    - Scenario Modules now properly save and load when the rest of the game saves and loads.
    - Scenario Modules can now have multiple target scenes set.
    - Improved the internal logic for switching to nearby vessels, it shouldn't refuse to switch with valid vessels nearby anymore.
    - Added a system to attempt upgrading incompatible save files if/when possible.
    - Tweaked PQS on other planets and moons to not initialize until approached. Improved performance a bit.
    - Added a new system on PQS to clamp terrain subdivision while moving very fast. Orbiting low near the surface is a lot smoother now.
    - Many more small tweaks and improvements.



    Important Upgrade Notes:

    * Do mind that as on all new updates, you shouldn't expect mods to work properly.

    * This new version is incompatible with SFS (savegame) files from previous versions. However, we now have a system that will allow you to upgrade these incompatible files if possible.



    So, as usual, you can get the new version at the KSPStore, or be automatically updated if you have the game on Steam. You can also use the patcher to sync your install without having to do a full download.


    Happy Launchings!

    Cheers

    xPDxTV
    <div align="center" id="ksp_weekly">
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    </div>
    <h2> July 23, 2013 </h2>
    </div>
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    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3>KSP Headline</h3>
    <p> The .21 update is close at hand and I sit down with C7 for some developer commentary. </p>
    <ul>

    <!-- //## COPY THE FOLLOWING LINE FOR EACH LIST ITEM ##// -->

    <li><a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/41645-KSP-TV-Broadcaster-Applications-NOW-OPEN" title="" target="_blank">KSP-TV Broadcaster Applications</a> are now open so if you are interested fill out the form.</li>
    <li><a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/41648-Language-moderators-wanted" title="" target="_blank">Language Moderator Applications</a> are now open so if you are interested in helping out the international community please head on over and fill out the form.</li>
    <li> Your weekly developer update. </li>
    <li> PD hosts a developer commentary with C7. </li>
    <li> The power of steam, is it still awesome? </li>
    <li> A look into a Kerbal Constellation like you've probably never seen before. </li>

    </ul>
    </div>

    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3>Developement Updates</h3>
    <h4>KSP Dev Team Updates</h4>
    <ul>

    <li><b>Felipe (Harvester)</b>: Still going through bugs here. Didn’t get as much dev time as I would have liked this week because I had to venture out into the outside world to take care of some paperwork... not fun. The game’s been steadily getting better and more stable though, it’s looking pretty good overall. </li>

    <li><b>Chad (C7)</b>: This past week I've been refining the SAS to be even better, fixing up the Scenarios and Tutorials to be 0.21-ready and doing some good old general bug-fixing. </li>

    <li><b>Jim (Romfarer)</b>: Updated the gui’s with better exception handling. Particularly those IO cases where the dialogs are loading your vessels from file. </li>

    <li><b>Artyom (Bac9)</b>: Added nighttime emissive animations to the space center so that it will light up at night, fixed textures on multiple parts (in particular, emissive textures and heat animations of 5 engines) and rechecked the space center models for bugs for n-th time. Also spent time developing other new scenery, new island airport in particular. </li>

    <li><b>Alex (aLeXmOrA)</b>: Putting finishing touches to the webdev stuff. Do not panic if the website goes into maintenance mode. </li>

    <li><b>Daniel (DanRosas)</b>: Polishing, rendering, and making sure a certain animation looks great. </li>

    <li><b>Rob (N3X15)</b>: VAAAAARNIIIIIIISH! *shakes fist* That and fixing more power supplies, fixing databases, and getting email validation and password resets working on Spaceport 2, which was a far bigger deal than I anticipated. </li>

    <li><b>Mike (Mu)</b>: Fixing bugs, optimising various things, creating new bugs, fixing new bugs. </li>

    <li><b>Ted (Ted)</b>: Over the past week, I’ve consumed an ocean’s worth of coffee and clocked in 60+ hours on KSP. As a Team, we’ve found and fixed 53 bugs, this week and the number is still increasing! Additionally, I’ve also been working very closely with Chad on perfecting and fine-tuning some of the features he’s implementing. </li>

    <!-- //## COPY A LINE FROM ABOVE AND EDIT AS NEEDED ##// -->
    </ul>


    <!-- //## OPTIONAL SNEAK PEAK BLURB & IMAGE ##// -->

    </div>

    <div class="ksp_weekly_item">
    <h3>YouTube Spotlight</h3>
    <p> I had an opportunity for an exclusive interview with Chad "C7" Jenkins in this .21 sneak peek video! This one will contain spoilers so if you don't want .21 spoiled for you please skip the video. </p>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/xpdxtv" target="_blank">xPDxTV</a></div>
    <br/>
    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/-tslKIlAxHQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>

    </div>

    </div>
    <div class="ksp_weekly_rightcol">

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    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3>KSP Mod Spotlight</h3>
    <p> Once in a while a mod comes around that offers a great deal of versatility and usability. Today we bring you Steam Gauges by Trueborn. Not only will you get that classic look of old gauges but you will also get a great deal of usability as it offers up information without adding all the extra autopilot features of other mods. Watch the video down below as our very own Scott Manley showcases this brilliant mod. </p>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/40730-SteamGauges-Release-Thread" title="" target="_blank">Steam Gauges</a></li>
    </ul>
    </div>
    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3>KSP Mod Showcase</h3>
    <p> Interested in seeing more about the Steam Gauges mod? Check out Scott Manley's video showcase! </p>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/szyzyg" target="_blank"> Scott Manley </a></div>
    <br/>
    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/usIgxnFI7fM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>

    </div>

    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3> Through The Telescope </h3>
    <p>By: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives'>http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives" target="_blank"> Pleborian </a></p>
    <p> The Constellation mission, if it had not been cancelled, would have been one of the most ambitious space exploration mission of our time. Out of all the proposed missions for NASA this one has always piqued my curiosity and it seems I'm not alone.
    <p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/katateochi">Katateochi</a> has carried out this great mission on behalf of all Kerbals everywhere in an effort to bring life to the barren planet of Duna, I really recommend giving this a watch as it's a great tribute to a great idea. </p>
    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Tp6yj2k0Fpc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
    </div>

    <div class="ksp_weekly_item">
    <h3>Editor's Notes</h3>
    <p> Every week we receive a plethora of amazing fan creations and it is always amazing to see what you our community has to offer. We are limited in how many items we can promote, however, do not let that stop you from submitting! If you have a screenshot, picture, animation, cinematic trailer or any other type of fan-work please keep on submitting them as we love to see all of your creations!</p>

    </div>

    </div>

    <br clear="all" style="clear: both;" />
    <div class="ksp_weekly_footer">
    <p>
    <b>Brought to you by the KSP Media Group</b><br/>
    Author / Editor: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/xpdxtv" target="_blank">xPDxTV</a><br/>
    Reporter: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborian" target="_blank">Pleborianlives</a><br/>
    </p>
    </div>

    </div>

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    xPDxTV
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    </div>
    <h2> July 16th, 2013 </h2>
    </div>
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    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3>KSP Headline</h3>
    <p> This week we have some potentially amazing news for those that are worried about saves files. This feature hasn't been confirmed yet but Harvester gives us a sneak peek into what it could look like. </p>

    <ul>

    <!-- //## COPY THE FOLLOWING LINE FOR EACH LIST ITEM ##// -->

    <li>Your KSP Weekly Dev Updates!</li>
    <li>Sneak peek into the new KSC!</li>
    <li>Jebs daring plan to get home?</li>
    <li>NovaPunch is still being updated!</li>
    <li>Pleborian sorts through all the fan-work submissions with his telescope!</li>

    </ul>
    </div>

    <div class="ksp_weekly_item">
    <h3>Developement Updates</h3>
    <h4>KSP Dev Team Updates</h4>
    <ul>

    <li><b>Felipe (Harvester)</b>: Bugfixing, Bugfixing, Bugfixing.... Also wrote a system to attempt upgrading saves, which is currently being tested. No word yet on whether or not it’ll even be usable, and even then, it’s not going to be able to adapt every save, but we might be able to salvage a station or two. </li>

    <li><b>Chad (C7)</b>: Over the last week, I spent a good bit of time with the testing teams working on bugs. Nothing terribly exciting, just polishing up things mostly. </li>

    <li><b>Artyom (Bac9)</b>: My precious, flawless models traitorously concealed some bugs from me which only came up right now. So I’m fixing those. In other news, I improved the models of roads, created a new crawlerway that properly connects to the launchpad, and did some important tweaks to interior lighting in VAB. It’s an ongoing process, I still have some stuff of that sort to do over the next few days. Overall, though, I’m very satisfied with how my content is sitting in the game. Old space center feels almost foreign now. </li>

    <li><b>Alex (aLeXmOrA)</b>: Almost done with the webdev stuff! Can’t wait to show the world. </li>

    <li><b>Daniel (DanRosas)</b>: Adding the final details to that thing I’ve been animating. You know, particles, color correction, and that sort of kerbal happiness. And helping out aLeXmOrA with his ultra secret thing. And you finally saw the 2D assets I was talking about! It’s good to know you liked the Steam Trading Cards, they were really fun to make. How about some wallpapers with those famous kerbals? </li>

    <li><b>Mike (Mu)</b>: I’ve spent the week fixing bugs and adding enhancements to various systems. </li>

    <li><b>Ted (Ted)</b>: This week I’ve been slaving over a hot Bug Tracker, ensuring all is running smoothly. The influx of new Experimental Testers has kept me very occupied all week, with showing them the ropes and helping them get their head around 0.21. Finally, I’m getting still used to working with this awesome Team of Developers. </li></br>

    <!-- //## COPY A LINE FROM ABOVE AND EDIT AS NEEDED ##// -->
    </ul>


    <!-- //## OPTIONAL SNEAK PEAK BLURB & IMAGE ##// -->
    <p> So this week I get to show you the new KSC, however, keep in mind that these images are still subject to change. We also noticed that the Kerbal responsible for implementing floating white fluff has shown his face again and the pictures were only able to be acquired after his involvement and image doctoring. </p>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://imgur.com/a/OSyk6#0"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/LEc5sOD.png" alt="Sneak Peak .21 KSC" /></a></div>

    </div>

    </div>
    <div class="ksp_weekly_rightcol">

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    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3>KSP Mod Spotlight</h3>
    <p> NovaPunch is one of the oldest maintained mod packs still available. Being kept upto date by Tiberion this mod pack has truck loads of rockets, SRBs, fuel tanks and more. Updated to .20.2 recently this one is definitely worth a look if you are looking for a complete overhaul of parts. </p>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="http://kerbalspaceport.com/novapunch-remix-pack/" title="" target="_blank">NovaPunch</a></li>
    </ul>
    </div>
    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3>KSP Mod Breakdown</h3>
    <p> As you all know mod development is slowing to a crawl and perhaps an all out halt until the release of .21 we will work hard to make sure you guys get your mod spotlights as new mods are introduced or older ones updated, however, at the current time there seems to be a lack there of. </p>

    </div>

    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3> Through The Telescope </h3>
    <p>By: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives" target="_blank"> Pleborian </a></p>
    <p> Ever since rover wheels were implemented during 0.19 there has been no shortage of wheeled contraptions. Even here on the KSP weekly we get infected with the need to make a ride that Jeb can be proud of, and this week is no exception.
    <div align="center"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/cAEF5q2.jpg"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/nWHfuWz.jpg" alt="Buggy" /></a></div></br>
    <p>I present to you what is simply called the 'Buggy' by Coloneljesus, this bad boy of a motor utilizes the latest tech in rover technology to propel your Kerbals at ridiculous speeds without ever leaving the ground. </p>
    </div>

    <div class="ksp_weekly_item bottom_border">
    <h3>YouTube Spotlight</h3>
    <p> Nassault630 created this brilliant Kerbal Cinematic about a true 'Jeb' inspired plan. This one is worth is definetly worth a watch. </p>
    <div align="center"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/Nassault630" target="_blank">Nassault630</a></div>
    <br/>
    <div align="center"><iframe width="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/J1Mtv_HN184" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>

    </div>

    <div class="ksp_weekly_item">
    <h3>Editor's Notes</h3>
    <p> I'd like to thank everyone for their continued submissions of fan-works to the KSP Weekly! We get an average of 12-20 submissions per week and unfortunately we cannot feature them all. If you have a screenshot, picture, cinematic trailer or other fan-work please keep on submitting them as we love to see all of your creations!</p>

    </div>

    </div>

    <br clear="all" style="clear: both;" />
    <div class="ksp_weekly_footer">
    <p>
    <b>Brought to you by the KSP Media Group</b><br/>
    Author / Editor: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/xpdxtv" target="_blank">xPDxTV</a><br/>
    Reporter: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pleborianlives" target="_blank">Pleborian</a><br/>
    Special Thanks: Maxmaps - KSP PR Manager<br/>
    Special Thanks: Capt'n Skunky - KSP Community Manager<br/>
    </p>
    </div>

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