Nate Simpson

Check the best of thread.

While it’ll be tough to beat the sheer number of fixes that went into Patch One, we’re seeing quite a few big ones go down in Patch Two. We are still pulling a couple of late-breaking improvements into that build - once we’ve got it in QA’s hands we should be able to give you a date, and of course full patch notes will be posted when the build goes public. Until that time, here are a few things that are already checked into Patch Two: Fixed loss of vehicle on reference frame change when physicsless parts present Fixed flamed-out engines not restarting properly Enabled switching between vehicles in atmospheric flight (within PhysX bubble) Recovered Kerbals now return to VAB Kerbal Manager Gave click priority to planets rather than moons when zoomed out in Map view Struts and fuel lines no longer broken after cloning subassembly in VAB Fixed bug: vessels with no control deleted during save Fixed flowers on Kerbin Added "next" button to seizure warning screen Height fog added to all atmospheres Updated parking garage collision (now possible to enter structures) Various CPU and GPU optimizations to improve performance There are other improvements that we’re hoping to squeeze into Patch Two (one of which got checked in last night), so hopefully a few more big-ticket items will get added to the list in the coming days. Here are a couple of screenshots to show our progress. We have pruned all the hovering flowers made of squares and replaced them with flowers made of flowers: We’re also pretty excited about how nice the new height fog is looking. It’s a subtle change, but it adds a lot of depth to the landscape: In other news, I did a Discord AMA this morning, and you can read some speedily-typed transcriptions of my answers here (thanks @Dakota). Thank you for all your questions - we received literally thousands of them and did our best to include as wide a variety as possible. This was lots of fun, and we’ll be doing more AMAs in the future! We’ll do our best to choose different questions the next time around so that things don’t get too repetitive. If you’ve got thoughts about how we can improve our AMA process, please let us know! We’ve also got another Community Highlights post on the forum - it’s very exciting to see how Patch One has unblocked some more ambitious missions! Please keep sharing your creations in the #ksp2_screenshots and #ksp2_challenges Discord channels- our team is fueled by your crashes achievements! We’ve also added an upvote system to both of those Discord channels. If you like something, add an :upvote: emoji. If an image in one of those channels gets fifteen or more upvotes, it’ll appear in a new channel called #ksp2_bestof. If you posted a screenshot you’re proud of that has now been lost in the mists of time, feel free to resubmit your creation so that the community can give it the upvotes it deserves! Also, the KSP Forums have themes now! You can opt into them by clicking the theme dropdown at the bottom of the page: And speaking of Weekly Challenges, we’ve got a new one: this week, we’re heading out to Duna! Check out the Discord for details! Have a great weekend.

This is absolutely amazing. Were these posted in the screenshots channel or the weekly challenge? Tell us where to go to give you the upvotes!

Just adding to what Dakota said above: we've got a good local repro and we're hunting this down right now. The documentation at the top of this thread was fantastic and really helped us focus in on the problem. Thanks @FlazeTheDragon!

Patch One is out, and players have been putting it through its paces for a whole day now! We’ve still got plenty of work to do, but the overall takeaway seems to be that the game has seen some big performance and feature improvements. It has been especially nice to see that even "small" gains are appreciated by our players - rest assured that the devs who work on those features are reading your comments and feeling the love. Our team will soak up all these good community vibes and use them to power us toward Patch Two, which will contain even more optimizations and improvements. Your feedback and bug reports have been invaluable in helping us to determine the frequency and severity of ongoing issues, and that information informs our production priorities going forward. Performance improvements and bug fixes will continue to take place alongside ongoing development of core features like re-entry heating, thermal systems, and other headline features on the Roadmap. As you can see, progress is being made: We can’t yet predict which update will contain re-entry heating - for obvious reasons, we’re holding ourselves to a very high standard of performance. As soon as it’s doing everything we need it to do, in every situation in which it needs to do it, we’ll add re-entry to a future patch. In other news - if you haven’t seen any of the ExtraKerbicular Activities videos, you should check them out! Our Community Team has put a ton of work into creating bite-sized assets that go deeper into vehicle construction and piloting tips, and there's a new one about wings! They’re fun, they’re informative, and they make a great follow-up to the tutorials. Let's see, what else? Oh, next Friday, I'll be joining the Community Team to do my first AMA. You can submit your questions via this forum post or directly to Discord. On Friday morning I'll dig into the pile and do my best to answer as many as I can! Last but not least, we’ve got another Weekly Challenge! This week we’re building Apollo recreations (though the stretch goals go a bit beyond that). Now that docking, decoupling, and fairings have calmed down a bit since Patch One, this is a great chance to start working on some more ambitious missions. Happy launching!

Just to be super clear, this is 100% the team. They really care a lot about this game.

Use of multiple radial boosters that feed fuel into one another along a daisy chain rather than all feeding directly into the core stage. This keeps all boosters topped off so you can drop them in pairs.

These are a high priority for us. As soon as those systems are stable and performant, they will be added to a future update. This is not yet in, but it is on our backlog and it is important to us.

Mag boots are still a thing. This corrects an issue where you could use the mag boots to walk on the sides of rocks.

These were items about which the community expressed special interest. They are also items in which I had a special interest!

You can download the update from the PD website.

The v0.1.1.0 Update for KSP2 is live! The complete patch notes for this update can be found here. We’ve had a busy few weeks! First, the fine print: while this patch contains a lot of big improvements, it does not fix every bug in the game! This update represents the first step in an ongoing process of improvement that will continue through Early Access. If a high-profile bug that is especially important to you has not been addressed in this patch, please keep in mind that the order in which fixes roll out is not just contingent on priority — it also depends on the complexity of the problem that's causing the bug. The KSP community has done a very good job communicating their priorities to us, and we’re working to resolve the highest-impact issues first. Among the changes we’re most excited about (and again, check out the patch notes for the approximately 300 changes contained in this update): Optimized fuel flow calculations to cut processing by up to 3x and reduce garbage by half Improved joint strength for engine plate floating stack attach nodes Fixed R.A.P.I.E.R. engine mode-changing issues Fixed an issue that prevented loading of a saved game within an existing Campaign, caused workspaces not to load properly, and prevented saving the game Fixed issue that could cause some environment objects to spawn on top of the active vessel, causing KSC and other objects to move to the origin Fix for engine thrust being deflected at too high of a value when a part obstructs an engine’s exhaust (the Kraken Drive bug) Fixed physics impulse occurring when an engine runs out of fuel Fixed issue where some parts remain connected to/follow vessel after detachment Fixed stack decouplers staying connected to the vessel when staged with certain engines that have fairings enabled Fixed trajectory intercept patch not showing when captured by a Celestial Body Fixed stack decouplers operating as if crossfeed is active even when PAM entry shows crossfeed disabled We are currently aware of one new bug in Patch One: when far from the viewer, runway lights toggle off. That issue will be resolved in the next patch. A few minor adjustments have been made to terrain around certain areas of interest (for example, collision has been restored to the bottom of the Mohole). There is a very small (but non-zero) chance that this update could cause issues with landed vehicles near those locations. If you do encounter such an issue with a saved game, you can revert to an older build to move your vehicle to safer ground. We are hard at work on Patch Two, and have already committed some important new changes to that build (upcoming fixes in Patch Two will fix fuel line issues that prevent asparagus staging, stop the unexpected in-flight destruction of vehicles equipped with physicsless parts, and allow vessel switching in an atmosphere, among other improvements). We don’t yet have a release date for Patch Two, but it should arrive sometime in the next few weeks. We will update you here when we know more. As always, thanks for your patience and continued support. As you know, this is a very big game, and the community’s ability to shine lights in every corner has given us much better visibility in a lot of critical areas. We hope that the performance improvements and bug fixes in today’s patch open up new opportunities for fun, and we look forward to making game even better.

I see a few people here interpreting Mortoc's post as an admission that we just took the terrain system from KSP1, slapped a new coat of paint on it, and called it PQS+. I'd like to clarify a few points here - again, from a non-specialist perspective, but based on what I witnessed as our terrain system evolved. While PQS+ does tessellate terrain in the same way that the original system did (that is to say, increasing the poly count when an observer/object gets close to the surface), it also does many, many things that the older system did not and is fundamentally a new system. Among the new requirements - it needed to support triplanar mapping, it needed to allow our terrain artists to intermix multiple distinct biomes in ways that looked good at all scales, it needed to support many octaves of detail so that artificial-looking patterns did not emerge at either high or low altitudes, it needed to support the addition of topology-defining decals for areas of high detail, and it required painstaking co-development with our environment artists to give them the tools to bring all of those things together in a way that looked natural and beautiful. I am actually quite proud of the progress made by our team on this system. I'm also very excited about ongoing performance improvements, as well as all the amazing new tech that Mortoc is developing. PQS+ has performance challenges, but it has brought a huge number of new capabilities to KSP2 - namely, unlocking the vision of our creative team so that they could reimagine the Kerbolar System and craft the new star systems that will arrive over the course of Early Access. I think the new planets look stunning, and I think the terrain system almost does itself a disservice by doing so many formerly impossible things so well - for example, highly varied planetary surfaces betraying no tiling or biome transitions at high altitudes, or procedurally mixing different kinds of terrain so seamlessly that you forget how magical it is that nothing ever actually repeats. It provided us with the ability to be ambitious in our vision for KSP2, and I'm very thankful to the many people who worked very hard on the system to get it to where it is today. That said, Mortoc is super rad and we're all pumped to see what comes next!

I think the plan is to release the patch notes on the day it goes out, but if I discover otherwise I'll update you here.

Good afternoon, fellow Kerbonauts! We continue to make good headway on performance improvements and bug squashing. In fact, we managed to sneak a few additional fixes into the first patch, including a fairly high-impact resource flow optimization. We also fixed the "Kraken drive" bug that created insane reverse thrust when an engine’s nozzle was obstructed - so if you’re working on a Kraken ship, the "unique" physics on which it depends are about to go away forever. We may not in fact have killed the Kraken yet, but we have definitely stubbed its tentacle. As to the timing of Patch One... QA is thoroughly testing the build right now, and as soon as they give us a thumbs-up, we’ll release it. Right now, our goal is to release that patch next Thursday (March 16th). Provided QA does not uncover any show-stopping bugs over the next few days, that date should hold. If they do run into something unexpected that needs to be fixed, that date will slip. We have done a fair amount of hand-wringing around whether we should announce the target date for this patch when there is a non-zero chance of a delay, but we know this topic is very important to you all, so we're doing our best to keep you all in the loop. We’ve also already completed a nice queue of fixes to go into the second patch, but we’ll talk more about that after we’ve got the first one out the door. To help tide you over until then, we’ve got a new performance-focused dev blog post from Mortoc, our senior graphics engineer. If you’ve been wondering how we test performance and what we’re doing to improve it, this one’s definitely worth a read. Finally, I just wanted to give a holler of support to the many people who have undertaken the weekly challenges - last week’s air-launched rocket challenge was a sight to behold, and we’re on the edges of our seats to see what mayhem will take place during this week’s Minmus challenge. If you want to take part (or just bask in the ingenuity and/or madness of our community), check out the Weekly Challenge Discord channel. Our Community Team has also picked out a few choice gems from the last week and added them to a Community Highlights post here. Yes, the shopping cart is in there. The shopping cart that flies. See you on Minmus!

Color game extremely strong here - reminiscent of the old Gulf Porsches. Great use of the new cargo parts, too!

These are gorgeous! I hope more people post their creations in this thread. Don't want to miss out on gems like this.

We chose that song exactly because it perfectly sums up both the experience of playing and making this game. I'm so happy that everybody understood our meaning!

Since I have asked similar questions about other games in the past, I have a lot of empathy for this perspective. Now I must do my penance by explaining what it looks like from the other side! I'm sure one of our producers could give you a more precise answer, but here's the general idea: every time we release an update, we essentially take a snapshot build of the game and then test it like crazy. That uses up a huge amount of QA bandwidth, and for a game like KSP2 it really is a non-trivial amount of work to test it in a way that approximates the range of activities that the entire community might get up to in the game. As they test that snapshot build, they sometimes discover bugs. Many of them (hopefully most of them) will be known bugs that are already tracked and that we're already working on. But some of these bugs might actually be new bugs that have emerged since the last update. Those point to unintended outcomes related to recent checkins -- i.e. by fixing one problem, we have created a new problem. We are trying very hard to hold ourselves to the standard of "the game should get better with every update," and that means that we take this sort of bug very seriously. This means that when such a bug arises, production and engineering go over these issues with a fine-tooth comb and figure out what broke, and then additional fixes are applied to the build until it's in a good state. Now, as you may have noticed, getting a candidate build to a level of quality that it's safe to release involves a lot of coordinated activity among a lot of people who also need to be advancing other areas of the game (for example bringing about perf improvements or working on roadmap features). Our update cadence is therefore carefully balanced against our need to keep pushing the entire game forward toward 1.0. Of course I would love to drop an update every day like the update Easter Bunny, but the reality is that each update comes with a cost, and we want to have the bandwidth to work on cool stuff like Colonies and Interstellar too. With that in mind, and because we want each update to contain lots of meaningful improvements, we can't release rapid-fire updates. HarvesteR was amazing and deserves his godlike status in this community, and I remember hanging on to his every post back when he was updating KSP. But I suspect that he was also constrained by similar production realities. All that said, I think it's safe to say that our key focus today is to correct issues that affect the quality of gameplay, which means performance bugs, bugs that stop some players from being able to play the game at all, bugs that result in loss of vehicle, bugs that result in mission failure, bugs that result in the game crashing, and bugs that ruin campaign saves. When such fixes are complete, we do not intend to sit on them for a long time. One of life's great frustrations is to read a complaint about a bug online and know that it's been fixed internally. As long as the wait between updates may feel on the outside, let me assure you that it feels even longer on the inside! Now @nestoris going to yell at me for speaking about this topic in a sloppy fashion, and I encourage him to join me in this thread if he'd like to add more to my explanation. I hope this at least gives you some sense of the environment within which our task assignments take place.

This is actually a great question! We have a very strong sense of which bugs affect the gameplay experience the most right now, and those issues have been assigned accordingly. Unfortunately, there is often a correlation between the profundity of a bug and the amount of time it takes to correct. This sometimes has the effect of "low importance" bugs seeming to get fixed on a faster timeline than "game breaking" bugs, and this is interpreted by some observers to mean that those bugs were more important to us. This is not the case. There are many people working on many bugs in parallel, and some of the systems involved are highly complex.

Point of clarity: this is not a list of "bugs we are aware of," this is a list detailing a subset of the issues that will be addressed in the first update. We have a very good sense of which of the current bugs are affecting gameplay quality the most, but in the interest of managing expectations we will not pre-announce any fixes until they have been tested and verified on our end. We appreciate the detailed and thorough reporting we've received from our community so far - that reporting is helping us to determine task priority and we are working hard on fixing those items. Since not all fixes require the same amount of effort, the order in which these items are completed does not necessarily reflect the order in which they are being assigned internally.

Those will pop up here.

What a week! First off, a huge thank you to all of the people who have decided to join us here at the beginning of Early Access. It’s been so exciting to see what you’ve done with KSP2’s new parts, and even though there have been some bumps in the road, it’s been so fun to explore the new Kerbolar System through your eyes. At the end of each day, our team has enjoyed camping out in the official Intercept Games Discord’s KSP2 screenshots channel and basking in the endless waves of creativity, innovation, and pure insanity. This community does not disappoint! Early Access has also yielded its first crop of bugs for us to fix, and we’re already making good headway. Our first Early Access update, which is planned to take place in the next couple of weeks, will contain the following fixes (as well as many other improvements that we’ll break down in more detail in our patch notes when the update goes out): Performance/Optimization Optimization: Main menu loading time reduced for min spec machines Optimization: runway light geometry simplified Optimization: engine exhaust CPU usage reduced Optimization: 50% reduction in main thread time spent on UI Flight/Physics Fixed: KSC and other objects follow vehicle to orbit Fixed: Engine plate floating node joints less rigid than other stack node joints (were not receiving multijoint reinforcement) Fixed: Planned trajectory enters runaway state when switching between flight view and map while engine is burning Fixed: Kerbals fall through ground when traversing ground near launchpad Fixed: Spotlight/headlight parts have dim bulbs and low effective range Fixed: Low-mass parts never stop moving on low gravity celestial bodies Fixed: RoveMax TR4 wheels sink into ground and spring craft upward when returned to focus Fixed: Loss of vehicle control when reverting to launch on runway Fixed: Physics impulse occurs when engine runs out of one fuel type, causing loss of vehicle Fixed: Game breaking when loading to VAB or loading a saved game with a vessel in flight Fixed: Animation stutters when EVA Kerbal is running Fixed: Large ladder disappears when base of ladder outside of camera view Environments Fixed: Ground decal applies to vehicles traversing margin of KSC grounds (removes Predator camo effect applied to rovers at edges of KSC) Fixed: Kerbin atmosphere and ocean vanish after returning to KSC from non-atmospheric celestial body Improved: Floating rocks/mesh scatter (floating reduced) Fixed: Kerbol lens flare still visible when observer is close to star Fixed: Improved collision for structures around KSC, including parking garage and fuel facilities Fixed: Clouds missing from celestial bodies when viewed from long distance Fixed: Atmosphere missing from Kerbin when viewed from the Mun’s SOI Fixed: Laythe atmosphere appears broken in map view User Interface Fixed: Camera middle-mouse movement axis does not switch to horizontal when in horizontal build mode Fixed: Launch Assembly tool breaks after repeated use in VAB Fixed: Debris not targetable Fixed: Time warp controls not accessible on KSC landing screen Fixed: Debris trajectory lines only appear after switching to flight and back to map Fixed: Some graphics settings adjust to “medium” after setting quality preset to “high” Fixed: Game crashes when returning to the main menu from VAB Fixed: Broken/empty Kerbal portraits in flight view Fixed: No orbit line after loading a saved game Fixed: Some difficulty settings don’t persist after ESC menu closure Fixed: No portrait representation in flight for probe cores We appreciate your patience as we continue to bring improvements to the game, and we thank you for your help in continuing to identify bugs and report them to us via our Customer Support page. In addition to the above bug fixes, you’ll notice a number of refinements, including increased vehicle part polish and an updated map interface. Ongoing performance improvements will also surface in this and future updates. We will provide a more detailed blog post soon to give you a better view into the ways that we’re assessing performance data, as well as what steps we’re taking to improve framerates on all platforms. Hang in there, we’re working very hard on this right now! Finally, if you have any questions about the game, please check out the FAQ, which our community team has been diligently updating to address today’s most frequently-encountered questions. *- Highly requested by the community

I'm just gonna camp out in this thread today.

The day is nearly here. This moment feels a little bit like dropping a kid off for the first day of school. We’ve got a lot of love for this game — we think we've prepared it for every eventuality, but we also know that it has more growing to do. We’re about to take the first steps on a journey that will eventually carry KSP2 through colonies, interstellar travel, and multiplayer. Now the real learning begins! What To Expect On day 1 of Early Access, players will be able to create and fly vehicles in Sandbox Mode and visit any location in the Kerbolar System. They’ll also have access to our first four interactive tutorials, accessible via the all-new Training Center. These teach basic rocketry concepts to give new players a head-start on their space programs. You’ll encounter new parts, including new procedural wings, new wheels, new command pods, new cargo parts, and new engines (and the first of the new fuels – liquid hydrogen). To pave the way for the upcoming interstellar-class parts, we’ve also added a new, larger core size. As we progress through Early Access, we’ll continue to expand on all of these features. We can’t wait to finally see what creative feats the community can achieve with the new procedural and color-customizable parts. Our environment team is eager to watch players explore the revamped terrains of the Kerbolar System (and are curious if they'll discover anything unexpected). The UX/UI team is keen to learn how the updated user experience feels - they've put a lot of effort into wrangling a very complex set of requirements into a new, more streamlined presentation. This is it — the moment has arrived when all our plans come into contact with reality! There are many new features, big and small, for you to explore on day 1. We've put together this guide to give you an overview of what's new and to break down some known issues. Release day notes and future patch notes will also live here. In the launcher you'll find reporting tools that you can use to tell us about any problems you've encountered, as well as to give us feedback about any other aspect of the player experience you think we should know about. This feedback will be invaluable to us as we continue to improve the game's stability, performance, and playability. What Comes Next Many new features will arrive as we continue development, including Science Mode, Colonies, Interstellar exploration, and Multiplayer. Take a look at our Early Access Roadmap for more details. In the meantime, we're bringing back Weekly Challenges! We intend to mix things up a little bit going forward, but the first challenge will be a classic Achievement Challenge: Primary goal: Fly to the Mun and get a picture of a Kerbal in front of the most interesting feature you can find Stretch goal: strand a Kerbal there and pick them up with a second vehicle, returning them safely to Kerbin Jeb-level goal: do any of the above on any other celestial body in the Kerbolar System Val-level goal: pronounce "Mun" correctly If you want us to see (and maybe share) your achievement, use #KSP2WeeklyChallenge on social media, or share them in our official Discord. Welcome to KSP2! The journey begins!