Devnote Tuesday: Forums, letters and development

[SQUAD]

Hello everyone!

This week we’ll start with community news instead of the development updates instead of the other way around. As many of you will have noticed by this point our community forums have been migrated to new software and this has raised a lot of questions we’d like to answer.

The first question on many people’s mind was why we felt the need to migrate in the first place, or as is often said: why fix something that’s not broken? The answer breaks down into a few reasons:

• vBulletin 4 is an old piece of software, released in 2009 and hasn’t received a significant update since mid-2012. This lack of updates, and assumed end of life approaching, means that the software is or will become incompatible with things like updates to PHP, MySQL and other server-side software that gets released to address various issues – and to introduce new web features.
• On a technical level, vBulletin 4 is a collection of several systems that are quite poorly integrated with each other, meaning that any maintenance is a pain and administration and moderation are spread out and sometimes inconvenient. Though extremely versatile the poor integration causes quite a few headaches.
• The mobile support, we felt, was lacking. With more and more people using the forums on their mobile devices being stuck on either a mobile theme with limited functionality or a full-sized website which requires constant zooming in an out is less than ideal.
• Related to the first point: vBulletin is slowly but surely building a reputation as a piece of software that is insecure (see for example this article), and we feel the security issues are not properly recognized by the company developing the software.

These points combined meant we went out to look for a new option. Last year we attempted to upgrade to vBulletin 5, which turned out to be quite a disaster as the new forums were just not functional. There are quite a few options out there, for example phpbb, SMF, Xenforo and the one that we ended up selecting: IPS. Each one of these packages has its pros and cons, and all are definitely capable – but going in-depth on the reasons why IPS got our preference is a bit too much for these devnotes.

Kasper (KasperVld) worked through the weekend to get the forums migrated, and with a little support from IPS and our webhost Multiplay we eventually resolved a few large issues that we were not expecting, such as a series of 502 errors which plagued the forums on Sunday. The forums are now mostly functional, although there are some growing pains, but we’re very happy with the final result. Customization and new features are something we can work on from here on out, so if you have good ideas we invite you to share them in the appropriate threads. Any change will break someone’s workflow, and this is quite a major one. Give it a try for a week or two and we’re sure you’ll find that the new forums are an improvement.

On to development then, it’s been another week of Felipe (HarvesteR), Mike (Mu), Daniel (DanRosas) and all the other devs working on the user interface and other bits of the transfer to Unity 5. Dropping our internal Christmas deadline, discussed last week, was definitely the right call looking back on it, we’re taking our time to increase the quality of the product delivered which is what ultimately matters most. KSP is a labor of love.

Felipe has focused on redoing the lightmapping for the editor interiors. Unity 5 uses a completely new lighting engine called Enlighten which, despite being awesome, means that some of our assets had to be updated to support it and look right. Remapping the lighting is not a very hard job, it’s one of those things that just takes a long time to do. Some of the scenes require several hours to break down, map, light and composite the entire scene geometry into a set of lightmap textures.

Related or perhaps contrary to lighting, a persistent showing issues that showed up since the move to Unity 5 has been looked into. The terrain showed some odd shadowing artifacts depending on the angle at which we would look at the terrain tiles. So far it seems that this is a Unity related bug, and we’re working on collecting data and finding a workaround so we can submit the information to Unity and have them fix the bug.

Last week we mentioned we reached full coverage on our user interface overhaul, which means that the worst of the work on the interface is behind us and Felipe and Jim (Romfarer) are now down to a long list of smaller tasks and tweaks. One of those tweaks was a small change to the part search filter Jim has been working on, which now searches continually as you type which gives a much more polished feel to the system.

On the producer side of development Ted and Joe (Dr_Turkey) have changed our routine a bit, introducing short daily development meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page constantly, and knows what needs to be done. Joe in particular has been meeting with some undisclosed ‘parties’ to replan some ‘stuff’ now that we’ve decided to delay our Unity 5 update. As much as the author of the devnotes tried, we couldn’t get another gobble of information out of him.

Speaking of meetings, we’re following up on leads we’ve gotten at the Astronomy Night at the White House, and also some European themed contacts. This is a pretty long-term project but it’s never too early to get the ball rolling.

Also worth mentioning is Nathanael’s (NathanKell) bugbashing process. After reviewing the result of the mother of all merges he’s dived into fixing the fairing lift offset bug and an issue with engine water detection, as well as tackling an issue where parachutes would overestimate mach effects in low-density situations.

Dave (TriggerAu) has continued his work on the KSPedia and has been working on a system of smoke testing in preparation for the QA period of 1.1. Something that is especially important given the wide scope of the changes that are coming in 1.1. If you have experience with smoke testing and have good ideas on how to integrate smoke test lists and results in our Redmine bug tracker system, Dave is still looking for feedback.

Finally we’d like to give a shout-out to Emil, who wrote us an amazing letter. We’ve received it and everyone has read it. Thank you so much for sending the letter Emil, we loved it!

View the full article

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

Nice devnotes, guys!

EDIT: First!

Edited December 1, 2015 by Mad Rocket Scientist

[Caelib]

What is this letter from Emil you speak of?

[KasperVld]

3 minutes ago, Caelib said:

What is this letter from Emil you speak of?

A very sweet fan of ours, who wrote us a great letter

 

[manaiaK]

17 minutes ago, SQUAD said:

... Dropping our internal Christmas deadline, discussed last week, was definitely the right call looking back on it

...

Ted and Joe (Dr_Turkey) have changed our routine a bit, introducing short daily development meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page constantly, and knows what needs to be done.

This is all reassuring for the long term.

[Red Iron Crown]

Is Emil this guy?

[Kobymaru]

20 minutes ago, SQUAD said:

Joe in particular has been meeting with some undisclosed ‘parties’ to replan some ‘stuff’ now that we’ve decided to delay our Unity 5 update. As much as the author of the devnotes tried, we couldn’t get another gobble of information out of him.

Mysterious

[Bill Phil]

Hey! Devnotes!

Thanks for all the hard work, Kasper.

Still hyped for Unity 5!

[smjjames]

So, even if it didn't look broken from the outside and those who didn't know the internal workings (or work directly with the forum software) thought it was working just fine, it was pretty broken on the inside.

Makes sense to me now.

Also, when are you guys going to do away with this wierd 'pressing enter equals two enter presses' thing?

[worir4]

Just wondering is 1.1 going to have any graphical improvements, or just lighting improvements, or neither?

[Starwhip]

30 minutes ago, SQUAD said:

On the producer side of development Ted and Joe (Dr_Turkey) have changed our routine a bit, introducing short daily development meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page constantly, and knows what needs to be done. Joe in particular has been meeting with some undisclosed ‘parties’ to replan some ‘stuff’ now that we’ve decided to delay our Unity 5 update. As much as the author of the devnotes tried, we couldn’t get another gobble of information out of him.

Interesting! Also interesting, hovering over highlighted text brings up a "Quote This" button. Guess what that does.

[smjjames]

33 minutes ago, SQUAD said:

Related or perhaps contrary to lighting, a persistent showing issues that showed up since the move to Unity 5 has been looked into. The terrain showed some odd shadowing artifacts depending on the angle at which we would look at the terrain tiles. So far it seems that this is a Unity related bug, and we’re working on collecting data and finding a workaround so we can submit the information to Unity and have them fix the bug.

I've noticed this sometimes with building shadows, but I thought it was an OpenGL thing.

 

[cantab]

40 minutes ago, SQUAD said:

Joe in particular has been meeting with some undisclosed ‘parties’ to replan some ‘stuff’ now that we’ve decided to delay our Unity 5 update

Maybe I'm oversceptical, but I shan't be surprised if that "stuff" goes over like a lead balloon with the existing players.

[TheMoonRover]

48 minutes ago, SQUAD said:

Joe in particular has been meeting with some undisclosed ‘parties’ to replan some ‘stuff’ now that we’ve decided to delay our Unity 5 update. As much as the author of the devnotes tried, we couldn’t get another gobble of information out of him.

Speaking of meetings, we’re following up on leads we’ve gotten at the Astronomy Night at the White House, and also some European themed contacts. This is a pretty long-term project but it’s never too early to get the ball rolling.

Now that's interesting. Undisclosed 'parties' and European themed contacts.

EDIT: Semi-Ninja'd

Edited December 1, 2015 by TheMoonRover

[Superfluous J]

Nice thing to wake up to, this. One thing, though: The "Link to Full Article" appears at first glance to be a link to the letter From Emil.

Also?	Tables
are	now
a	thing!

 

Edited December 1, 2015 by 5thHorseman

[TheMoonRover]

2 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Nice thing to wake up to, this.

Also?	Tables
are	now
a	thing!

 

They were before, but you had to write them in BBcode. Hence my signature broke.

[Mischief]

I would wait months for every feature coming in 1.1 save for 64bit. That.... without that I can't really play the game anymore. I've fallen in love with all these mods but we just don't have enough available memory to spend the time together we need. It's a tragic love story, really. They're all so pretty! So smart! So charming! You can't ask me to choose!

Edited December 2, 2015 by Mischief

[CrashTestDanny]

Just curious, have you updated your informal/internal deadline or is the next release postponed indefinitely?

 

Danny

[smjjames]

4 minutes ago, CrashTestDanny said:

Just curious, have you updated your informal/internal deadline or is the next release postponed indefinitely?

 

Danny

I doubt it's 'indefinitely', but they don't want to be hobbled by a hard release date either.

[Dman979]

2 hours ago, SQUAD said:

On the producer side of development Ted and Joe (Dr_Turkey) have changed our routine a bit, introducing short daily development meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page constantly, and knows what needs to be done. Joe in particular has been meeting with some undisclosed ‘parties’ to replan some ‘stuff’ now that we’ve decided to delay our Unity 5 update.

Is this SCRUM? I've been working in a group using SCRUM, so I am now constantly on the lookout for it.

[Superfluous J]

19 minutes ago, smjjames said:

I doubt it's 'indefinitely', but they don't want to be hobbled by a hard release date either.

Actually that's what indefinitely means. It only resembles "infinitely"

1 hour ago, TheMoonRover said:

They were before, but you had to write them in BBcode. Hence my signature broke.

Oh I know. Mine did too. But now they're a thing HERE. In the editor.

[federicoaa]

2 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

Nice thing to wake up to, this. One thing, though: The "Link to Full Article" appears at first glance to be a link to the letter From Emil.

It looks like now every squad post has a link in the bottom to the tumblr devblog. I wonder why they call it "full article"

[r4pt0r]

27 minutes ago, federicoaa said:

It looks like now every squad post has a link in the bottom to the tumblr devblog. I wonder why they call it "full article"

I wonder that too, its the same thing 

[biohazard15]

A question about ground scatter.

Do you have any plans on making all these rocks and trees actual objects instead of ghosts? Just got my hands on ED Horizons beta, and it's a very fun experience trying to avoid rocks while driving a rover. (Or just jumping over them using thrusters)

[DuoDex]

Personally, I think that improved ground textures would be awesome.