Nate Simpson
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Posts posted by Nate Simpson
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Good afternoon, Kerbonauts.
This past week has been a learning experience. My last post here received a lot of comments, many of which expressed doubt, frustration, and in some cases even anger about either the seeming lack of progress on KSP2 or the perception that I am concealing some dark reality about the state of the game. Our team has been reading your comments and asking one another if there’s some way we can do better.
In the past, every item in these forum posts has had to cross a threshold of certainty - I don’t want to announce some new feature or target date, only to experience a trust-eroding failure to follow through. I feel this burden especially keenly because in the past I have personally announced dates that turned out to be incorrect. For that reason, I have avoided talking about features in progress, bugs under investigation, or internal delivery deadlines. With a game this complex, nothing is ever assured until it has been thoroughly tested by QA. When you combine this "stay quiet until you’re absolutely sure" ethos with a more dispersed update cadence, what you get is long periods of silence.
Now, of course I haven’t gone literally silent. I still post here every week. Before each post goes out, I meet with the production and community teams to review the past week’s progress, and a great many exciting developments are discussed. They often take the form of "we’ve made great progress on x category of super annoying bug" or "this feature looks good but we haven’t had time to fully validate it yet." By my standard of "don’t talk about it until it’s truly done," neither of those scenarios yields anything that’s safe to post about. What is safe, then? Well, for the most part, content updates (new art, new parts, new graphics improvements) come along in nice, neat little parcels that are not only visually pleasing, but also unlikely to generate an unmet expectation. They’re fun and they’re safe, and artists are always creating new content. So you see lots of that.
But the other thing you see lots of is some variation on "improved stability and performance." That’s my catch-all term for that very meaningful category of progress that, because of my reluctance to write bad checks, can’t yet be talked about in detail. When I hold back on such items, I comfort myself that the less I reveal now, the more surprising the patch notes will be when we finally release them.
Still, I’m questioning my choice to withhold information about systems in progress. Yes, there’s always the chance that when we talk about a feature in development, that we’re also creating an expectation that the feature will be present in the next update. Similarly daunting is the possibility that we’ll announce that we’re working on something that the community perceives as "easy" (an especially common situation when we’re working on a feature that is already functional in the original KSP), and then take such a long time delivering that feature that people may decide we don’t know what we’re doing. In such cases, we then need to take the time to explain in technical detail why the implementation of such and such a feature is non-trivial in KSP2. Increased transparency carries costs, and those costs always have to be balanced against other feature-facing work we could be doing.
So what I’m going to try to do right now is to extend some trust to you. I’m going to talk about a few things that are not yet complete so that you can at least see some of the ropes we’re hauling on every day - some of which may prove to be long. This list is not exhaustive (there are dozens of people working on dozens of items simultaneously, and there are some features that we really do want to be surprises), but it will hopefully give you some visibility into the breadth of issues we’re tackling. Please do not assume that if a bug didn’t get mentioned in this list that it is unknown to us or not being worked on — this is a top-ten list.
Our bug prioritization is broadly guided by the following logic:
- Category A: any bug that causes loss of a vehicle in flight (physics issues, trajectory instability, decoupling instability, loss of camera focus, unexpected part breakage/RUD)
- Category B: any bug that affects the fidelity or continuity of a saved game (rigidbody degradation, save file inflation, loss of vehicle or Kerbal during instantiation or focus switching)
- Category C: any bug that negatively affects the expected performance of a vehicle (drag occlusion, staging issues, thrust asymmetry, joint wobbliness, landing leg bounciness)
- Category D: any VAB bug that prevents the player from creating the vehicle they want to make (symmetry bugs, fairing/wing editor bugs, strut instability, inconsistent root part behavior)
While there are many bugs that live outside these four categories (and in some cases, such bugs end up getting sorted out during normal feature development), the four categories above are the biggest fun killers. Until a player can envision a vehicle, create it without being impeded by VAB issues, fly it with a reasonable expectation that physical forces will be consistently applied, and save their progress at any point without worrying about the fidelity of that save, the KSP2 experience will be compromised. Obviously, now that we are layering in progression mechanics (Science gathering and transmission, missions, and R&D tech tree) in preparation for downstream Roadmap updates, the importance of addressing these issues only increases.
Therefore, here are a few of the biggest issues we’re wrangling with right now:
- Vehicles in stable coasting orbits sometimes experience orbit instability/decay - Status: possible fix in progress
- Trajectories change when vehicles cross SOI boundaries - Status: fix in progress (see below)
- Certain inline parts cause aerodynamic drag numbers to spike - Status: under investigation
- Returning to craft from VAB causes craft to go underground (possibly related to Kerbals and landed vehicles dropping through terrain while being approached) - Status: possible fix being tested
- Decoupling events result in various issues including loss of control, incorrect controllability of decoupled subassemblies, loss of camera focus, and other issues - Status: may have many causes, but some fixes in progress (see below)
- Save files get bigger over time (TravelLog experiencing "landed" status spam) - Status: fix being tested
- Opening part manager causes major frame lag - Status: experiments ongoing
- Major post-liftoff frame rate lag immediately above launchpad (associated with engine exhaust lighting) - Status: fix being tested
- Root parts placed below decouplers cause issues with stage separation - Status: under investigation
- Vehicle joints unusually wobbly, some part connections unusually weak - Status: under investigation
We’re tracking down some strange vehicle behaviors associated with spurious autostrut errors. As we’ve discussed here before, some radially-attached parts are reinforced by additional invisible autostruts to improve their stability. It turns out that these autostruts don’t always break cleanly during decoupling events, and may be the cause of some of our more frustrating decoupling issues (including those where detached vehicle elements appear to still affect one another’s behavior). We’re still investigating this one, but we have high hopes that its correction will result in a reduction of mission-killing errors.
Finally, we have zeroed in on the cause of some of the trajectory errors we’ve been seeing - especially the situation in which a trajectory changes spontaneously when crossing an SOI boundary. This one is deep in the code and its correction may end up fixing a few other downstream issues. This is a complicated problem, however, and we may not solve it in time for the June update. We should know more about this one soon.
I’ve provided the list above as a stopgap. We have been discussing internally how best to improve bug status visibility so that you have a better idea of what we’re working on. We’re looking at a lot of options right now, and I’ll update you when we’ve settled on something. We recognize the need for this transparency and we’ll come to a solution soon.
ANYWAY... we have some nice content news! Update v0.1.3.0 will be the first KSP2 update to contain not only bug fixes, but a few new parts. Right now, we can confirm the arrival of the following:
- A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E
- Clamp-O-Tron shielded docking port
- Clamp-O-Tron Inline Docking Port
- MK2 Clamp-O-Tron Docking Port
- Cornet Methalox Engine (new small extensible-nozzle orbital engine)
- Trumpet Methalox Engine (new medium extensible-nozzle orbital engine)
- Tuba Methalox Engine (new large extensible-nozzle orbital engine)
- S3-28800 Large Inline Methalox tank (longer version of large methalox tanks)
Here’s some video of those new engines in action. The Tuba has individually-swiveling mini-nozzles that might be one of part designer Chris Adderley’s coolest ideas yet (final parts built by Pablo Ollervides, Jonathan Cooper, and Alexander Martin):
We are still testing the new grid fins. Because these parts require some special part module support, engineering work is ongoing. Due to the complexity of this work, we don’t believe grid fins will make it into the v0.1.3.0 update.
Last week’s challenge produced a few spiffy designs. Check out this rocket, with which user Well braved the Kraken and managed to deposit a lander at the bottom of the Mohole:
Gotta respect the ingenuity of using antennae for landing legs:
Thanks to those who participated!
Next up, at the suggestion of @RyanHamer42 on Twitter, we’re building space stations! Your mission, should you choose to accept it:
- Primary goal: build a station by docking at least two Wayfarer habitat modules together in orbit above Kerbin
- Secondary goal: add a deployable solar panel truss and a fuel depot tank to your station
- Jeb-level goal: dock a transfer tug to your station and place the station in orbit above another planet
- Val-level goal: send a lander to your station that can be reused for down-and-up flights to the surface of the planet below
Thanks for the suggestion, Ryan! Good luck, everyone!
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There's been a lot of activity on this thread, and a lot of valid concerns expressed. I'll try to address the points I saw most frequently, but there's a lot here. I'll do my best.
- Some have wondered why we are showing the progress we've made on features peripheral to the larger mission of "fixing the game." Eg. why are we working on grid fins when we still have trajectory bugs? That's actually a really apt question, as we had a major breakthrough on wandering apoapses last week (and it probably deserves its own post in the future). The issue, as many have pointed out, is that we have a lot of people on this team with different skill sets, working in parallel on a lot of different systems. Our artists and part designers have their own schedules and milestones, and that work continues to take place while other performance or stability-facing work goes on elsewhere. I like to be able to show off what those people are working on during my Friday posts - it's visual, it's fun, and I'm actually quite excited about grid fins! They're cool, and the people who are building them are excited about them, too. So I'm going to share that work even if there is other ongoing work that's taking longer to complete.
- A few people are worried that because I haven't yet posted an itemized list of bugs to be knocked out in the next update, that the update will not contain many bug fixes. As with earlier pre-update posts, I will provide more detail about what's being fixed when we have confirmation from QA that the upgrades hold up to rigorous testing. As much as I love being the bearer of good news, I am trying also to avoid the frustration that's caused when we declare something fixed and it turns out not to be. I will err on the side of conservatism and withhold the goodies until they are confirmed good.
- The June update timing does not mean "June 30." It means that I cannot yet give you a precise estimate about which day in June will see the update. When I do know that precise date, I will share it.
- We continue to keep close track of the bugs that are most frequently reported within the community, and that guidance shapes our internal scheduling. As a regular player of the game myself, my personal top ten maps very closely to what I've seen in bug reports, here on the forums, on reddit, and on Steam. The degree to which I personally wish a bug would get fixed actually has very little impact on the speed with which it is remedied. We have a priority list, and we take on those bugs in priority order. We have excellent people working on those issues. I can see with my own eyes that they're as eager to see those bugs go down as I am, so there's not much more that I or anybody else can do but to let them do their work in peace.
- We - meaning, our team and the game's fans - are going to be living together with this game for many years. As aggravating as the current situation may be, and as much as I wish we could compress time so that the waiting was less, all I can do for now is to keep playing the game and reporting on what I experience. The game will continue to get better, and in the meantime I will choose to interpret the passionate posts here on the forums as an expression of the same passion that I feel for the game.
Thanks as always for your patience.
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A fine May afternoon to you, fellow Kerbonauts!
I’ll start with a bit of good news: the v0.1.3.0 update will be dropping in June. We’ll announce an exact target date when we’re a little closer to the big day. We’ve already seen a few big bugs go down (you can throw a fairing away now in the VAB without endlessly redeploying its editor, for example), but I’m going to hold off on itemizing other fixes until they’re confirmed zapped by QA. Regardless, we’re feeling good about our progress in all areas and are confident that the next update will provide good performance, stability, and gameplay improvements.
In the meantime, our design and content teams continue to bring new parts to life. What they’re building now: grid fins! These were designed by Chris Adderley and brought to life by Alexander Martin (and Chris would like me to point out that the fin on the right is shown upside-down so that you can see the beautiful serration detail):
Our tech artist Jon Cioletti (with the help of graphics gurus Chris Mortonson and Phil Fortier) has pulled off the impressive feat of improving both polish and performance by overhauling the solar lens flare occlusion system. Lens flare occlusion (the scaling/disappearance of the sun’s lens flare when passing behind objects) no longer uses raycasts or colliders — now we’re literally counting pixels on the sun itself. The result: no more sun peeking through terrains or oceans, no more weird flare behavior behind vehicle parts, and the sun now shines correctly through visors, trusses, parachutes, and windows! Check it out:
In community highlight news: we’ve reviewed your capybaras and have found them variously cute, hilarious, and unsettling. For more capybara shenanigans, check out this roundup. Lookit this little fella from @Inyxia:
In other creative news, the last Dres-bound Weekly Challenge produced some very ambitious missions. We have very much enjoyed following your successes and near-successes. We know that flights of this complexity can anger the Kraken, especially in the game’s current state, and we salute those who push through regardless.
Check out this not-at-all-precariously-balanced lander by AVATAR Aang:
Or this cool rover hauler by GoldDragon:
Let’s see if we can rival these results with our next challenge: we’re going to Moho! Visiting the innermost planet of the Kerbolar System takes quite a lot of Delta-V, but if you’re up to it, you can try one of the following:
- Primary goal: do a Moho flyby and take some screenshots from orbit!
- Stretch goal: land on Moho and return to Kerbin!
- Jeb-level goal: land a Kerbal in the Mohole... and then return them to Kerbin!
- Val-level goal: all of the above, but get your Moho intercept by using a gravity assist from Eve!
See you all next week, and happy flying!
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Good afternoon, Kerbonauts!
I wanted to start off by saying thanks to all of you who have been so patient and supportive as we’ve progressed through Early Access. We play KSP2 a lot, and we understand both the big and little frustrations around playing the game in its current state. It’s easy enough for me to say, in my corporate way, that we’re "aware" of these bugs and that we’re working on them, but I don’t think that gets close to the urgency we feel. This is a project to which we’ve devoted all our energy and passion. For many of us, the 1.0 version of KSP2 will be a crowning, career-defining achievement. We’re not just "aware" of the bugs. They stand between us and the promised land, and we are making every effort to eradicate them. It means a lot to us that in spite of the setbacks, the community still believes in this team and in the overall vision for KSP2.
We’ve been working on the usual stuff this week (bugs, stability, performance, and new feature work for the Science update). We expect to be able to communicate timing for the upcoming v0.1.3.0 update next week. In the meantime, we’ve been building some lovely Science collection parts, which are meant to provide interesting, meaningful payloads for research missions. This is one of our new radial science collection parts (designed by Chris Adderley, built by Alexander Martin, and animated by Paul Zimmer:
Bonus points to anybody who can identify what all the science bits do!
On to this week’s challenge: we’re going to Dres! If you in fact are a believer in Dres’ existence (I myself am skeptical), feel free to attempt the following:- Primary goal: Land on Dres
- Stretch goal: Land in one of Dres' canyons and return safely to Kerbin
- Jeb-level goal: Land a rover on one side of the Dres canyon and jump the canyon. (You can use rockets to hop and cushion impact, but use wheels to gain speed)
- Val-level goal: Place a satellite in orbit within the outer gap in Dres' rings
- Tim-level goal: Do all of the above in one mission
Finally, if you’re in the mood to check out some other players’ impressive vehicles, take a look at kspbuilds.com! Not only do these downloadable workspaces contain vehicles that are fun to pilot, it can also be super instructive to pull one of these into the VAB and take it apart to see what makes it tick. Here’s a little taste:
Some very creative use of procedural wings in there, right?
Have a great weekend!
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Good day, fellow Kerbonauts.
In last week’s post, I communicated our intent to decrease the update cadence during Early Access to allow our team to devote a greater portion of their time moving toward 1.0 and a little less time prepping incremental public updates. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of you have expressed concern that this change signified some dark portent. To ease some of your concerns, here are a few clarifications:
- Our team is fully funded, properly staffed, and completely focused on executing the full vision of KSP2. Our velocity is good and our morale is great. This is still a dream job, and we’re still committed to making this game spectacular
- We want to balance our desire to be Santa (literally the most fun part of my job) against our goal of delivering an excellent product. The update cadence we’re looking at right now extends the previous cadence by 2-3 weeks - structurally, the change is not radical. I know the waiting can be painful, especially when there are still game-breaking bugs. Hopefully, the fact that each update will contain more improvements due to that lower frequency helps to offset some of the frustration of waiting
- This project has from the beginning been viewed as a long-tail endeavor requiring a long-term investment. We are not worried about keeping the lights on, and we will be delivering all of the promised roadmap features over the course of Early Access
- We will continue to post these weekly forum updates to provide visibility into areas where gains are being made. These posts are by no means comprehensive, not least because many of the improvements we’re seeing aren’t necessarily photogenic. They are meant to give you a taste of what’s to come
For example: we have seen rescalable UI elements in action for the first time this week (with many thanks to our newest engineer Ryan Ekhoff). We know this is a highly-anticipated improvement, especially for players with higher-resolution displays. The sample below is work-in-progress (yes, I see the app bar isn't scaling yet) -- the final implementation is likely to index to preset sizes to avoid scaling artifacts. I’m certainly looking forward to this upgrade:
Yesterday, Darrin House, our Director of QA, posted a really in-depth dev blog that I think does a great job of showing the behind-the-scenes reality of testing this game. It pairs well with a lot of recent discussion in the community about the role of QA in the development process, and it gives some insight into the unique challenges presented by KSP2. No shade on previous dev blogs, but this one raises the bar. I am perhaps betraying how much I like pictures here. It has lots of pictures.
This week saw some unprecedented radness on the ksp2_screenshots channel. Check out these masterpieces from @Coriolis, @Little Earl, @memes1, and @Schwing2727:
I can't stop, there's just too much cool stuff. Here are four more creations by @hidearimjosh, @Keagan1st, @Suppise, and @APairOfVintagePants:
For more like this, take a peek at our screenshot roundup here!
Finally, this week’s Challenge: fly a mission inspired by ESA’s JUICE program. While we wait for the RIME antenna to get itself unstuck, let’s send good vibes ESA’s way by flying our own multi-moon probes to the satellites of Jool! Now’s a great time to polish up your gravity-assist chops. Your mission, should you choose to accept it:- Primary goal: send your probe to Jool
- Stretch goal: visit Jool and one of Jool's moons with your probe
- Jeb-level goal: visit all of Jool's moons with the same probe
- Val-level goal: achieve the Jeb level goal while doing one or more gravity assist maneuvers
Have a lovely weekend!
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Happy Friday, brave Kerbonauts!
A little bit of a slow news day here at Intercept Games as we gather feedback and data from our latest update and continue to work on stability, perf, thermal, and new features. I’ve spent more time than usual over the last week building rockets in the 0.1.2 build, and I’m relieved to see that my own personal points of frustration are mirrored in the feedback we’re getting from the community. I know we may sometimes seem remote, or that it may feel like your feedback submissions are falling on deaf ears. Not only are we collecting and reviewing your feedback, but the frequency with which you’re reporting on certain issues is incredibly helpful to our goal of prioritizing fixes. As always, we appreciate your patience as we work down the list and shore things up for update 0.1.3.
On the subject of updates: our update cadence is going to slow down a little bit. There are a couple of reasons for this, not least of which is that every time we release an update, we divert resources that would otherwise be focused on continuing to improve the game. We are always balancing our desire to improve the current Early Access experience against long-term goals that involve more time investment. This is a very personal issue for me, because as a fan I want the game to be perfect and awesome right now! But since genies don’t actually exist, that’s not how we’ll arrive at the best version of KSP2. We will continue to release updates prior to our big Science Feature update, and hopefully a slower update cadence will mean that when they do go out, they contain more robust improvements. We are still working out what that exact cadence looks like, and I’ll update you here when I know more.
Among the improvements that we’re seeing this week here at the studio, our planetshine system has taken a very big leap forward, and the next patch will feel quite different at night. Now, reflected light from planets and moons is much more apparent both in space and on the night side of a celestial body. A little sample of what Jool-light looks like on the surface of Laythe:
This week’s challenge: we’re building sci-fi spacecraft! There are already some very impressive entrants appearing in the KSP2 Discord ... check this thing out (by @S_Coriolis)!
That flux capacitor! MWAH!
Please also check out our TikTok! Our community team is very active over there, and their meme skills are quite breathtaking.
Have a great weekend!
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Good afternoon, Kerbonauts!
I’m back from Spring break and all charged up by the great feedback we’ve been getting since the release of Patch Two. Thanks to all who have taken the time to share their feedback about the update - as always, it’s been very helpful to know what’s gone well and what needs improvement.
By far the most controversial element of the patch has been a change made to maneuver nodes that prevents players from planning maneuvers beyond the fuel allotment currently aboard their vehicle. This change was made to prevent the maneuver node from lying to the player - because maneuver plans in KSP2 factor in the behavior of the vehicle under thrust (a necessity for planning future long-burn interstellar flights), and because this behavior is contingent on the changing mass of the vehicle as fuel is expended, any planning that takes place beyond what is achievable with the current fuel load must necessarily give an incorrect result. That said, there’s clearly a desire to be able to do aspirational maneuver planning beyond a vehicle’s current capacity, as was possible in KSP1. Our team is looking at our options now, and we’ll update you here when we have a good solution. Thanks again for highlighting this as a feature that could use some more time in the oven.
Right now, we’re full steam ahead on new feature development for the upcoming Science update (timing TBD), as well as continuing work on performance, stability, and thermal systems. We’re also working on a few new parts, which we expect to release prior to the Science update. Chris Adderley (AKA Nertea) has cooked up some lovely vacuum-optimized engines with extensible nozzles to help fill out the upper end of the methalox progression. Here’s a sneak peek at one of them, built by artist Pablo Ollervides:
On to business!
Yesterday morning, Shana Markham, our Design Director, did our second AMA and gave some very detailed answers to some challenging questions - and she did a much better job than I did of pulling those questions from lots of different sources, including this forum.
We’ve posted the audio from that AMA here, for those who missed it. This one is definitely worth a listen!
Lots of amazing creations on view in this week’s Community Highlights. While only a few images make the cut every week, be sure to check out the ksp2_bestof Discord for more amazing community creations! I’ve really been enjoying how we've all been channeling our Starship excitement into the game - check out this one from Sciencedude37:
Congratulations to SpaceX on flying Starship as far as they did, and breaking a whole lot of records (and one parked car) in the process. Fingers crossed for the next launch!
Finally, here’s the next Weekly Challenge: make a dragon! No, not the spacecraft. A literal dragon. Now get out there and creatively misuse those procedural wings!
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Hello fellow Kerbonauts!
Okay, we've got a date for the v0.1.2.0 patch - it'll arrive next Wednesday, April 12. We'll post patch notes on that day as well. There's a nice blend of performance, stability, UI, and visual improvements, and we think these add up to a significantly improved KSP2 experience. One unheralded improvement, in addition to the already-announced fixes - the nighttime lighting at KSC has taken a big step forward:
Meanwhile, we're continuing to work on upcoming Science Mode features, re-entry and thermal systems, and of course ongoing improvements to performance and stability. We've also begun some investigations into improving the current wobbly rocket situation, and we should have more to discuss on that subject soon.
For today's Weekly Challenge, we're going to Eve! Until the future arrival of re-entry heating, you've got a great opportunity to do a little low-risk sightseeing (and if you visit after next Wednesday, you'll get to experience Eve's stunning new height fog, as well):
Also, check out this week's burger-iffic Community Highlights post. So many amazing creations this week! There's also a new Tik Tok!
I'm heading out for a few days' rest in a place that has sunshine, which means next week's updates will be made by guest writers. Please be nice to them, but also don't be so nice to them that my bosses decide I shouldn't do the posts anymore. Please be medium nice to them.
See you in two weeks!
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Good afternoon, Kerbonauts!
While last week's AMA was great, it looks like I forgot to check my staging when lining up the questions - many have pointed out that a lot of Discord queries got answered, but questions submitted through Steam and the Forums were neglected. I’ll try to be more conscious of that when the next AMA rolls around, but in an effort to right a past injustice, I’ll answer a few of the questions that got missed right now! Here we go:
Filip Hudak, on the forums:"When we'll see other exotic fuel types like metallic hydrogen? Will they be added alongside some big update like colonies or will they be added before?"
We will be bringing in new engine and fuel types across multiple updates, generally as they become instrumental to the progression. I suspect nuclear pulse will be next up, as it opens up the interplanetary progression quite nicely and is a good supplement to colony building. Chris Adderley has also cooked up a few new methalox engines that I think will be popping up sooner rather than later.
Moons, on the forums:Are there plans to give some sort of legacy UI? Are there plans to make the UI more modular for users to adjust it and change it with mods - especially a way to scale the UI? Are there plans to reduce the UIs use of screen space?
This is a good example of an area that’s being developed iteratively. I think the first goal is to give players the ability to rescale the flight HUD, but making it modular and giving both players and modders more control over how things look is a key priority for the UX/UI team.
walkingwiki666, on Steam:"Will the games price increase as new features are added?"
The game’s price will certainly increase when 1.0 arrives, though if you purchased the game during Early Access, you’ll get all Early Access updates and the 1.0 update for free. After 1.0, we expect to continue providing free updates to the game, just like KSP1 did.
MARL_MK1, on the forums:"It is cool that we can press 'F2' and take HUD-less screenshots, but given that it's the most basic way of taking screenshots, and that many of us players enjoy taking the best pictures possible of our crafts: Does KSP2 plan to implement a fully fleshed Camera Mode in which we can change settings such as Focal Lenght, DoF, Focus, Tilt, Filters and most of the other cool options that modern games nowadays implement in their Camera Modes?"
I need to do a better job of evangelizing our capture camera controls! If you hit V, you can cycle through camera modes. When you’re in Capture Mode, the numpad offers a bunch of new camera controls that you can combine to do smooth, swoopy pans, dollies, zooms, etc. You can combine these with paused time warp to do some pretty fancy stuff. Here are those controls:
- zoom in: keypad +
- zoom out: keypad -
- roll left: keypad 7
- roll right: keypad 9
- orbit up: keypad 8
- orbit down: keypad 5
- orbit left: keypad 4
- orbit right: keypad 6
- pan up: keypad 2 (or up arrow)
- pan down: keypad 0 (or down arrow)
- pan left: keypad 1 (or left arrow)
- pan right: keypad 3 (or right arrow)
- mouse toggle: backslash
- speed up camera movement: keypad *
- slow down camera movement: keypad /
alphaprior, on the forums:"Will be possible to alter the surface on the planets? Like dig a pit or flatten an area for a colony?"
There are no current plans to do this - as you can imagine, it has some brain-bending multiplayer implications, especially when time warp gets involved. But it would be incredibly cool and I’m not aware of any specific technical blockers. It’s certainly come up in conversations with Mortoc, our senior graphics engineer. I mean, we have a game with nuclear pulse engines... the fact that you can’t make craters with them feels like a missed opportunity. So yeah, we’ll keep talking about this.
-----Thanks for your questions!
On to business. We have knocked out a few more bugs for Patch Two, including that pesky issue where vehicles with more than 8 parts in a radial symmetry set were loading into the floor. We’ve just about wrapped up the cherry picking process and can say with confidence that it’ll be out sometime in the next two weeks. We’ll post an exact date for Patch Two as soon as we know it.
As we continue stabilizing and improving performance, we’re also making progress on re-entry heating, new parts, and Science Mode. And just to highlight that other, bigger systems are always being worked on in parallel, here’s some footage of our QA team goofing off in multiplayer:
Yes, collision is working:
Last week’s Duna-focused Weekly Challenge yielded some incredible creations! If you’re in the mood to see highlights, the most-upvoted posts on both the ksp2_challenges and ksp2_screenshots Discords are now archived in the ksp2_bestof channel. There, you’ll see stuff like this:
Those hydrogen tanks shine up real nice!
Finally, an apology: we’ve had some minor technical difficulties getting the next Weekly Challenge put together, but we hope to be able to get something posted over the weekend. We regret the delay.
See you next week!
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1 hour ago, S_Coriolis said:
I posted in both but with the amount of screenshots that go by it's so easy to miss, but if you so want to see
https://discord.com/channels/1039959585949237268/1086333803859017899/1087620957616754688 for the Duna Kermes Mission
And if you want to have nightmare about train you can look my Minmus challenge... you were warned
https://discord.com/channels/1039959585949237268/1083796482597072906/1084171194464481404
Also I was quoted by Nate
thanks for the appreciation, as long as you and you team continue to add content in the game, we well find creative and unintended way to impress you 
Check the best of thread.
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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
crashesachievements! 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.
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16 hours ago, S_Coriolis said:
I make a MechJeb joke in 5 mins and it's in the highlights.
I take the weekend to recreate "The Martian" for the challenge and it goes under the radar
, well can't complain since I'm here at all 
(still hilarious to me)
Thanks !
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!
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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!
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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!
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Just now, Demcrew said:
Well done @Nate Simpson and the team.
Just to be super clear, this is 100% the team. They really care a lot about this game.
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6 minutes ago, Jacob Kerman said:
Asparagus Staging?
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.
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3 minutes ago, ExtremerBG said:
Any new about the re-entry and heating systems? Really looking forward to their eventual release.
These are a high priority for us. As soon as those systems are stable and performant, they will be added to a future update.
Just now, Kurtvw said:Did Joystick/controller support get in there and I missed it?
This is a great list of fixes and adds, but I really need to be able to use my controllersThis is not yet in, but it is on our backlog and it is important to us.
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4 minutes ago, DeltaDizzy said:
So the "mag boots" werent a feature? huh...
Mag boots are still a thing. This corrects an issue where you could use the mag boots to walk on the sides of rocks.
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1 minute ago, Stephensan said:
What does the rocket symbol mean, finished? or a POI?
These were items about which the community expressed special interest. They are also items in which I had a special interest!
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2 minutes ago, Hagbart said:
How will I get the patch as a Direct Download owner?
You can download the update from the PD website.
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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.
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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!
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29 minutes ago, Vinhero100 said:
will we get to see the full patch notes before it releases on Thursday (assuming the date doesn't slip?)
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.
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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!
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thanks for the appreciation, as long as you and you team continue to add content in the game, we well find creative and unintended way to impress you 
, well can't complain since I'm here at all 
(still hilarious to me)
Dragging Along
in KSP2 Dev Updates
Posted
Good afternoon, Kerbonauts.
This week, we’re working on many of the same bugs we were working on last week (one aspect of our increased transparency is likely to be that you get to share in the joy of waiting for the oven to go "ding"). We did see some encouraging movement on a few items, but I’ll keep the original ten bugs on the list until we’ve got bona fide QA sign-off on them.
Bug Status
For most of this list, investigation and/or testing is ongoing. Areas that saw significant change have been marked in bold:
Issue 2 - Trajectories change when vehicles cross SOI boundaries
We have three engineers looking at this and we have already ferreted out a couple of issues - the introduction of axial tilt to KSP2 introduced some discrepancies, and our SOI transit handoff math had some inconsistencies as well. A few other issues surfaced in the simulation code, and we’re assessing both the impact of those issues and the scope of work required to correct them.
Issue 3 - Certain inline parts cause aerodynamic drag numbers to spike
This bug is the one that saw the most movement this week. Our investigation of the spiking drag numbers revealed that we had a problem with drag occlusion — there is special code that reduces the frontal drag impact of a part that is blocked by another part, and in some cases we were seeing inline parts behave as though they weren’t shielded from airflow at all. In some cases, we were also seeing the opposite - wide parts that should have been creating drag were not having their frontal drag assessed at all. Of course, this latter case would rarely register as a problem, whereas the initial problem manifested in all sorts of unpleasant ways - essentially, parts positioned aft of other problem parts behaved like airbrakes, affecting both the overall drag and stability of the vehicle. Even weirder, these drag occlusion issues only arose when a vehicle was built horizontally!
This problem has been corrected. In fact, it’s been SO corrected that after we fixed it, we started to get messages from QA that aircraft felt too fast! We checked the numbers, and they’re correct. We’re still testing this fix, but it’s looking very good for the upcoming update. The details of how this problem was analyzed and corrected would make a very interesting dev diary from Chris Adderley, if he ever gets a few moments to spare.
Issue 8 - Major post-liftoff frame rate lag immediately above launchpad (associated with engine exhaust lighting)
Quick clarification: engines had previously each spawned a point light that cast shadows. While this was very pretty, it wasn’t great for performance (and this impact was increasingly pronounced at high engine counts). We have turned off shadow casting for those lights and are seeing an improvement in framerate near the launchpad.
Bug Reporting Progress
I also mentioned last week that we were exploring ways of communicating our current priorities more clearly, as well as giving members of the community more agency to communicate their own experiences and priorities to us. With that in mind, Dakota Callahan and the Community Team have begun to make some changes to the Suggestions and Development subforum. We’ll get into more detail about our specific implementation next week, but Dakota has already shown some of his work in that subforum - he’s taking several steps, including creating a new Bug Hunter member role, reformatting threads so that they can be up-/down-voted (this is just for bug threads), adding recommended tags/prefixes, and setting up a system that allows administrators to combine duplicate issues. This will start as a pilot program, and its success will hinge on how useful the community finds it and how maintainable our team finds it. The best possible outcome would be that players use the subforum to surface the issues they find most pressing, and our devs have the ability to ask directly for additional context. Again, I’ll provide more detail about this new structure when it’s fully in place, but in the meantime check out Dakota’s post - he’s got some great ideas!
Engines
After posting footage of the three new deep space methalox engines that will be arriving in update v.0.1.3.0, we’ve been asked by a few people what those engines can really do. Our Lead Producer Nestor Gomez (of KSP1 fame) suggested that we share some stats in the time-honored old-school way - with cool blueprint-style graphics!
Without further ado, here are the three new engines (with special thanks to Matt Poppe, who continues to do amazing work on everything he touches):
I have run a few missions with these engines, and I can attest that they’ve opened up quite a few new capabilities - ones that will become invaluable when the R + D progression enters the picture and nuclear thermal engines are not yet in reach.
Community Highlights
Last week, we did a space station challenge! Several of your impressive submissions can be seen over on our recent Community Highlights post. Some of this stuff is just nuts.
Check out this shot from <[I Flaze I]> on Discord:
Or how about this bad boy from HitchHacker:
I also really love this plane from spartandh211 (I’m a sucker for creative coloring tricks):
And then of course there’s a little sax-playing... cricket? From @The Space Peacock:
Be sure to check out that thread for even more fantastic creations. Thanks to all who submitted!
Weekly Challenge
This week’s challenge is technically about landing, though given Gilly’s low gravity, it might just as easily be called a docking challenge. Here are your goals:
Land onDock with GillyShare your submissions over here on the forums or over on Discord in #ksp2_challenges.
Good luck to you all, and see you next week!