ShadowZone

Statistics: 281 total changes 42 fixes (almost 15%) with help of community (rocket symbol) 59 in "UI/UX" 50 in "Flight & Map" 39 in "Parts & Stock Vessels" 37 in "Environments" 19 in "FX & Audio" 17 in "Tutorials" 15 in "EVA" 14 in "Construction" 7 in "Localization" 6 in "Saving & Loading" I think the fact that 15% of this huge patch was made possible through us, the community, shows how important it is that we stay active throughout the entirety of EA and keep providing our feedback, be it via bug reports or general suggestions how things should shape up. Had a first look at the patch and I have to say, I see many good things in there and also have multiple people confirm to me that my feeling that performance has significantly improved. Great job to everyone involved!

That is a looooong list, and I see quite a few bugs in there that have made life very difficult during the past 3 weeks. Can't wait to try this out!

Reentry heating will be patch 3 at the earliest, according to @Dakota: https://discord.com/channels/1039959585949237268/1039965578754007060/1085634401418887231

After two weeks with the new UI, I prefer the condensed information around the nav ball to the scattered info of the old UI. I know what I'm doing and see everything I need when I need it. And you never have bright green text (see your KER HUDs on top) that you cannot read because you're above a bright surface. Whoever designed the new UI knew what they were doing. HOWEVER, there is room for improvement: We desperately need UI scaling flight, map and VAB view. Everything is comically large, playing 1440p (like I do) I would expect I get more screen real estate for the actual game. I want a TWR indicator somewhere. Could be instead of the throttle percentage, because who really requires the throttle percentage written out? I never cared for that number. AP timer is buggy: when you are suborbital and have passed AP, the timer will show you the time since AP, but it is still displayed as a "minus" number, instead of a "plus" number. Map view: Orbits for the same craft all have the same color. This is terrible if you have multiple passes and need to discern which of the displayed lines is the one you will fly through next. I have missed a Duna encounter because of that because "time warp until here" was in fact not my current but my future orbit and I made an unintentional victory lap around Kerbol. Map view: there needs to be "time until" info for SOI or basically every node you can expand. I have gotten used to it, but I am still not a fan of the "pixelated" logos for SAS, RCS etc. I think that style clashes with the rest of the game, especially with how vehicles look. But I have heard from people that actually like them, so I guess "live and let live".

I am going to list a few things I did in regards to KSP2 and what I intended to to and what I still hope to do going forward. I leave it up to others to judge if that has brought or does bring any value to the community. Since 2019, I tried to break down all the new feature video releases as soon as they were available. Mostly because I myself enjoy this type of analysis and detective work but also because I thought this could be useful for people to gauge where the game is at in its development and where it's going. At many points during the past 3-4 years, I tried to get more information out of the developers than they offered on public channels - rarely with success, unfortunately. Since availability of the game, I have reported 74 Bugs and a couple of other issues I regard as wrong design choices to the developers - probably most of them duplicates of stuff others have reported already, since we don't really have a public bug tracker where we can look up what's what (yeah there's the subforum... but that doesn't replace a real bug tracker). I assume this is because Intercept Games has to bow to some T2 corporate rules that prevent this kind of transparenc (just a guess on my part based on the fact I was part of gigantic corporation at one point and know a little how they work). With my KSP2 videos, I try to entertain people and also show them what can be done - if the game permits it. I have already given up on 3 projects (after multiple hours invested) because game breaking bugs prevented me from reaching any semblance of completion. I try to be more active here on the forums than I was in the years past, because, frankly, my enthusiasm for KSP1 had worn off. And I might not be alone. I hope that with my increased involvement I can keep that flame for "awesome space game with little green men" alive for the next generation. I believe the world would miss something special if we wouldn't have had KSP1 and I sincerely hope KSP2 will one day reach the same status. Long story short: that's why I try to be more active again, to keep that flame going - as long as the developers deliver in the end. In general, I don't think people should feel the need to contribute in the sense of creating content or moderating etc. If you want to, fine. If you just want to consume the game and the content provided here on the forums or on YouTube or Twitch or whatever, that's fine, too. Because if we're being honest, a loyal audience is also worth a lot and I count that as a contribution as well. So thanks to everyone who has followed me and my channel over the years and continues to do so, I appreciate all of you!

That's not really what Nate said, at least that's not how I understood it. He said that 150 parts is the "sweet spot" where you can start to have some fun with the game. That was in reply to the minimum spec discussion. So what this means is that minimum spec should enable people to use at least a 150 part vessel without too much lag. It doesn't say that they don't test with larger vehicles.

I built a mostly faithful Shuttle replica. This screenshot is from the first launch that failed because I didn't have enough TWR. Went back and reduced fuel in the orange tank and "voila!", managed to get it into orbit and safely back home.

This is something I have thought about a lot lately and honestly, I don't see a meaningful way to automate video game testing. How do you automate a game like KSP2 that gives players immense freedom to build and fly ships? Okay, the vehicles are all .json files, so are the save games. So, maybe build something that makes vehicles with all possible part combinations, put those in different game states (orbit, landed etc) and check the values written into the save file .json against expected values? Even then you won't be able to catch all possibilities. Then there are the UI bugs, for instance orbital lines disappearing. How would you automate that? Coming from a few web products, I know there are frameworks like Selenium that offer UI testing that will even provide a generated screenshot to a bug report filed by it. But you can easily script tests for web products, since HTML, JavaScript etc are standardized and widely understood. A custom built UI on the other hand? I don't know how that should work... Yes, I know Unity has some test automation available, but I have no idea how deep it goes or if it would be even applicable to a game like KSP2. Would love to hear from game developers or test engineers how one could solve this.

So to put it even simpler: "Fixed" in your list above = you have already fixed it, this is guaranteed for the next update. Plus, there will be more fixes and improvement depending on how much you can get reliably done until the planned patch release. But you don't want to announce anything before it is in a "Fixed" state as well. Am I correct? Thanks for the update, this is helpful!

Hmm, that's a tough one. The "game paused/unpaused" bug has zero impact on your ability to build and fly rockets. So I would give it a very low priority. But a first time player will be put off by the game's UI freaking out every time they pause the game. So from that aspect it could be ranked higher. Without knowing the internal criteria inside Intercept Games how they prioritize their items, it's hard to say. For me personally, vehicles seemingly randomly failing ("vessel destroyed" when undocking, landing gear or other parts falling off the vehicle) should be very high on the list. I think those fall under the category of "corrupted save games" because all of this shouldn't happen and mostly happens after a save and reload. These instances have made me almost give up on certain missions over the past week. Then, all the shortcomings regarding maneuver plans: I create a plan, I have to click again to activate the gizmos. Why? When the gizmo is active, I cannot have PE/AP or any other node info fixed in view so I know what I'm doing. Basically I'm eyeballing every maneuver at the moment. You don't see the orbit past the SOI indicator when flying to Mun or any other bodies. There aren't any "time to node" infos When you have multiple orbits of the same craft laid on top (e.g. passing through Mun's SOI and then reaching similar AP again later), you have no idea which is which (all are blue) Maneuver plan does not display time left to burn. Maneuver plan required dV does not change while burning When switching flight view and map view during burn, planned trajectory is completely wrong (this bug is particularly bad for content creators who like to switch to the vehicle to see the nice engine plume and then check in map view) There's no transfer window planner yet. I have to rely on external tools. And there's more. Just listing the ones off the top of my head. All of this prevents players to leave LKO. And stunts any ambition to go interplanetary, because it makes that unnecessarily hard. Honestly, I agree that performance needs to be improved. But I don't care about many FPS if I can't go anywhere after I reach orbit. Or can rely on that when I restart the game my craft won't spontaneously combust. Everything surrounding these two topics are my personal top priorities for bugfixes.

I am roughly 24 hours in now. I have been to Bop, Minmus, Duna (more crashing than landing), Mun (and returning after a few failed attempts) and have experimented with planes including some VTOL designs. I like the game in general. Yes, there are situations where things just don't work. At all. But for the most part I can circumnavigate those. But I also understand why people would drop it until the most egregious bugs have been fixed. Unfortunately there are a lot of them, multiple game breakers included. The first patch will show us if our faith in the team is warranted.

Not sure this is the right place to post this, but I managed to restore a corrupted save by editing values for parts. Basically one of the new gigantic landing gears fell off after reloading, leaving me stranded on the Mun. I was able to find the relevant part in a previous uncorrupted (left) and the corrupted (right) save file. Changing the "AttachedPartGuid" value from all zeroes to the values on the left and changing "attachedPartNodeID" from "" to null restored my vehicle to functionality. Of course, a lot harder to do when more than one part fails. Until this is fixed, this might help some people restore their save files.

After many failed attempts, I finally managed to land on and return from the Mun. Including some really hefty Kraken wrangling where I had to edit save files to restore functionality.

Composer, singular. Howard Mostrom. He is also the lovely person highlighted in the "Recording Rockets" feature episode who was at ULA recording the Atlas V launch. And I believe it was him who borrowed me two lav mics and recorded audio when I did my interview with Nate Simpson back at PAX West 2019. Without his help that interview audio would not have been intelligible. Forever thankful to him. And to your initial remark: YES!!!! The Duna music is simply epic. Loving it a bunch.

When you say the old KSP1 easter eggs are no more, that also means no dead baby Kraken on Bop? No wonder I couldn't find it after more than an hour searching the area where it originally was...

Yes, this works. I contemplated whether or not I should be throwing environmental variables at people who may never heard of the concept, so I stuck to the full path, because I figured people will at least have heard that they have a drive in their PC.

I tested my Duna rover delivery system. Needs a gentle hand when putting it down on Kerbin (sorry, Jeb!), but should be fine for Duna. Now to build a rocket for it...

You can show dV per stage by pressing the button left of the "Launch" button. However, you cannot configure the TWR display at this point in time. This is a negative point I have raised with the developers during my time with the preview build over the past few days.

Nope. I pre-recorded that video because I was traveling basically the entire week. Which is also the reason why I couldn't make it to ESTEC. Which I am still sad about. But it wasn't in the cards.

Yeah people made me aware of my mistake already... I really never noticed that thing. As for the version history, I cut a few paragraphs about that from my script because the video was already so long. Might do that when we have the real thing in our hands.

Thanks for the mention and the great work aggregating the feedback so far! Unfortunately I didn't find this thread until my video was already released or I would have mentioned it. But I'll put a link in the video description. Here's the video btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvs6e92SqNg

I might have missed something, but can somebody please explain to me what "non-impulsive maneuver planner" means? For me, "impulsive" is usually a character trait, but I guess that's not it...

Yes that's pretty much what was said. Original quote at 8:43 here: https://youtu.be/Jw42iC-mlZM?t=523 And I agree with you on the faster workflow. Even KSP1 was able to get major releases out of the door every 6 months (roughly) from about 1.8 until 1.12 (not counting bugfix releases). So that was already pretty predictable and I'm pretty sure the KSP2 team already has some kind of major release cadence already planned. The main thing that's missing is what's really going to be in those releases, but that will also be up to us by supporting the developers in fine tuning the experience and prioritizing what really matters. Also something I highlighted in the video I released today. I also had a chance to chat with Nate about the Early Access and what will be in it. Those infos are going into a video I'll release on Sunday. Had a bit of a hell week and barely was able to get my early access announce video out. I recorded my talking head until 2:20am ... But I'm highly motivated to get more details out by Sunday

I love this mod. Together with Scatterer and EVE (thanks @blackrack for keeping the development going!!!) this is now part of my permanent modlist for KSP.

Could we extend the runway with those base building road parts?