Devnote Tuesday: Where did we leave the bugspray?

[Majorjim!]

Just now, Hcube said:

I have a feeling that this will never change... 

Agreed. We truly are the poor cousins.

[Shania_L]

9 hours ago, simonh said:

Regarding space fever in the UK, if you get the chance check out the Royal Institute Lectures this year, broadcast by the BBC. Try iPlayer. The title is 'How to survive in space', there are three episodes and they are immense fun. They're aimed at kids, but are well worth watching even if you don't have my advantage of having 11 and 12 years old kids to watch it with you.

Simon Hibbs

IPlayer is only available in the UK, try the Royal Institutes own website I believe they host them as well for those unfortunate enough to be foreign

[r_rolo1]

2 hours ago, Majorjim said:

Why have you guys not shared the image of KSP running on the PS4 that was shared on, ugh.. Reddit.. ?

Actually not. It was first posted on ... Dan's Twitter

[Majorjim!]

Just now, r_rolo1 said:

Actually not. It was first posted on ... Dan's Twitter

Actually yes.. It was then posted on Reddit by Squad staff.

[KasperVld]

KSP was already running on Playstation during the Playstation Experience convention back in December, where it was presented. This is just a picture from Dan that he posted because he was happy to have landed on Mun

[Red Iron Crown]

The pic in question: 

[Majorjim!]

Just now, KasperVld said:

KSP was already running on Playstation during the Playstation Experience convention back in December, where it was presented. This is just a picture from Dan that he posted because he was happy to have landed on Mun

My question was, why did you not share it here, on the official forum?

Edited January 13, 2016 by Majorjim

[Ignath]

6 minutes ago, Majorjim said:

My question was, why did you not share it here, on the official forum?

Because an official twitter post from an official dev isn't official and doesn't belong on the official forum, silly!  It just belongs on the unofficial official forum called redit. </sarc>

[Gojira1000]

Achievements? Yes, please, and thank you!

[KasperVld]

19 minutes ago, Majorjim said:

My question was, why did you not share it here, on the official forum?

Because it's not news, its just one of the developers sharing an achievement in the game. Now, since all this doesn't relate to the devnotes I suggest we get back on topic.

[Dr.K Kerbal]

Sounds cool. Keep up the good work!

 

[hoojiwana]

6 hours ago, m4v said:

Every time I heard about adding an achievements I go back to this article that explains why Don't Starve doesn't have any link
 tldr; intrinsic rewards are more important than giving the player medals for playing.

Yes, KSP already has a sort of "achievement system" in the form of World's First Records, but they aren't as prominent as things like Steam achievements, and you can't see what records you didn't complete yet, so is much easy to ignore and set your own goals.

That's a very nice article. I feel it applies to KSP more than you think though, a lot of career mode relies on rewards for doing things. A quote from the article;

Quote

At the highest level, the game that they were playing was “complete the task list”, and the actual game play became an obstacle to be overcome.

That sounds very much like contracts to me, gathering science less so but still has that problem.

Edited January 13, 2016 by hoojiwana

[TriggerAu]

17 hours ago, mcirish3 said:

@NathanKell and @TriggerAu  Hmm one thing I really wish was available as either a ingame aspect of the tutorial or as a MOD was a  preschool child friendly tutorial.

Am sure neither of us would say it is too hard, but I would say it would require a different tutorial mechanism to whats currently there - obviously or people learning to read are out of luck. Hopefully the updated/new tutorials will help new players (and some old players too - I've learnt stuff in working on em) to have more success and less frustration in their games.

Currently there is KerbalEdu which provides a number of additional aids to help with learning both KSP and the science behind it at school level, but it would require family time with the young'uns (as I do with my son) to help with the reading and comprehension. 

 

[Green Baron]

Heeding the call "back on topic" :-)

I'm very much looking forward to the ascend-path-indicator thingy. Does it take into account things like staging, mass-reduction due to burnt fuel, throttle settings, mass inertia ? You were saying that it leaves us with a circularization burn of ca. 130m/s at an altitude of 80km, which can be done manually if you know the behaviour of your design ... well maybe not every time :-). The first 15km decide whether it's gone a be a 3300m/s burn to orbit or well ... more.

Inertia is probably the biggest problem here and the reason why i only use 3 or 4 different launch vehicle designs ...

k

Edited January 13, 2016 by kemde

[mcirish3]

I am planning on buying Kerbal Edu eventually once my oldest can read.  But it seems a shame that they have to wait that long.  I have 4 children and one on the way so I have lots of young learners who could potentially be coming to KSP.

[John FX]

I like the idea of achievements if they can be done like final frontier where each kerbal has a personal set of firsts and there are also global ones.  Then you can see where each kerbal has been as well as where your program has reached.

[NathanKell]

@kemde to reinforce one more time, the indicator is only in those tutorials. It's there because we have great pilots who fly the ascent with the craft to record the pitch at a given speed, and the altitude at a given speed, and then I can construct the indicator pitch curves from that. It is not a "give it a vessel, hit a button, go to orbit" autopilot, it's a "follow me" tutorial helper.

[sibrit]

11 hours ago, kujuman said:

I'd also add that for certain achievements (such as landing on the mun), it'd be nice if it were made more robust. If I bounce my first landing, I don't want to achieve both "landing" and "take-off" from the mun--likewise, if I land and then tip over/break an engine/etc, I don't want my sudden terror of messing up to be spoiled by "Congratulations! You've landed on the Mun!"

 

 

Since KSP knows if you broke something (enough for it to show up on the F3 flight summary list), it could just say "Condolences. You've crashed on the Mun."

And then you get a Contract to rescue whoever was left stranded, assuming they were not consumed in a ball of fire...

[sibrit]

41 minutes ago, NathanKell said:

@kemde to reinforce one more time, the indicator is only in those tutorials. It's there because we have great pilots who fly the ascent with the craft to record the pitch at a given speed, and the altitude at a given speed, and then I can construct the indicator pitch curves from that. It is not a "give it a vessel, hit a button, go to orbit" autopilot, it's a "follow me" tutorial helper.

Would it just be an indicator on the NavBall (that either SAS can follow or you can manually adjust the trajectory of the rocket?), or are you intending to have some sort of "fly through the rings" type thing, which now that I mention it would probably be a bit crazy given the multitude of viewing options... Would it be based on the 3/4 throttle setting that is default for a launch? Does it take into account cutting back on the throttle to avoid terminal velocity shock? Is the throttle even part of the "follow me"?

OK. I really want to see how it would work now, because I've never considered putting a craft into LKO as simple as keeping it pointed in the right direction...

[mcirish3]

2 hours ago, sibrit said:

Would it just be an indicator on the NavBall (that either SAS can follow or you can manually adjust the trajectory of the rocket?), or are you intending to have some sort of "fly through the rings" type thing, which now that I mention it would probably be a bit crazy given the multitude of viewing options... Would it be based on the 3/4 throttle setting that is default for a launch? Does it take into account cutting back on the throttle to avoid terminal velocity shock? Is the throttle even part of the "follow me"?

OK. I really want to see how it would work now, because I've never considered putting a craft into LKO as simple as keeping it pointed in the right direction...

Download Mechjeb, install it,  create a sandbox game, build a rocket,  attach the mechjeb guidance module to the rocket, launch the rocket, click on the mechjeb sidebar on the upper right side of the screen, open up the auto assent module  and click on navball guidance button,  and there you have a working demonstration of what will be in the tutorial after 1.1.

[Green Baron]

8 hours ago, NathanKell said:

@kemde to reinforce one more time, the indicator is only in those tutorials. It's there because we have great pilots who fly the ascent with the craft to record the pitch at a given speed, and the altitude at a given speed, and then I can construct the indicator pitch curves from that. It is not a "give it a vessel, hit a button, go to orbit" autopilot, it's a "follow me" tutorial helper.

I see ! Thank you for clarification, sorry for missing out on the "tutorial only". Nope, wasn't asking for an autopilot or anything, just wondering how you did, which is clear now.

[John FX]

8 hours ago, sibrit said:

Would it just be an indicator on the NavBall (that either SAS can follow or you can manually adjust the trajectory of the rocket?), or are you intending to have some sort of "fly through the rings" type thing, which now that I mention it would probably be a bit crazy given the multitude of viewing options... Would it be based on the 3/4 throttle setting that is default for a launch? Does it take into account cutting back on the throttle to avoid terminal velocity shock? Is the throttle even part of the "follow me"?

OK. I really want to see how it would work now, because I've never considered putting a craft into LKO as simple as keeping it pointed in the right direction...

It really is that simple if your rocket is built fairly sensibly. I once wrote a KOS program to launch a rocket and all it was was a loop that looked at the height and adjusted the angle based on that and a check to see if the fuel had run out and if so, activate the next stage. Once Ap was at 82km, cut the engines then circularise at Ap. That was it.

/default at launch is 50%
//if you build your ship right you can just go 100% throttle all the way.

[Ser]

 

On 12.01.2016 at 2:08 AM, SQUAD said:

 

Hello everyone!

Sadly there’s not a whole lot to report on this week: like the past weeks the developers have been working on many, many, many bug fixes. It’s hardly surprising that changing over to a different engine and redoing the entire interface brings with it this amount of issues. We’ve got an ace team here to tackle them as they come.

 

As I remember, some time ago you've planned to use some advanced wheel physics engine (cannot recall its name) that should make behavior of wheels way more realistic. Do that plans still exist for 1.1 release?

[*Aqua*]

Afaik they are already implemented because the old wheel system doesn't work anymore in 1.1.

[Padishar]

14 hours ago, TriggerAu said:

Am sure neither of us would say it is too hard, but I would say it would require a different tutorial mechanism to whats currently there - obviously or people learning to read are out of luck.

You could just have Werner (or whoever) read it to the user.  Slight break of immersion for a Kerbal to be speaking English (or any other human language it gets translated to) but this is a rather special case...