Devnote Tuesday: Joe was censored!

[Windspren]

So the situation where rovers will not count as landed only works when they are counted as "stowed" in a cargo/service bay (boo the cannot activate while stowed bug). This makes it hard for VTOL planes that pick up rovers with the Klaw or rovers that drive on top of planes. Will this also affect rovers driving inside of cargo planes?

[Errol]

What was this player weighted planet thing they were talking about?

[Arsonide]

22 minutes ago, Xavven said:

This is great! Whether this was your own intuition or it was listening to the community, or both, career mode should tighten up a bit with these tweaks you are doing. Looking forward to 1.1! Thanks!

All career feedback eventually finds its way to my desk, and I try to read between the lines. Right now the general tone is that players want more control in career mode.

59 minutes ago, KasperVld said:

The thing about this particular change, is that when World First contracts were added they were given this cool logic to determine the order they should be presented in, but they were meant to be unimposing bite sized single bits of content. Explore contracts were basically a package of three or four World Firsts. The objectives overlapped entirely, there were just more of them at once. They were also presented at random times, without the cool logic that World Firsts utilized. This meant players felt pressured to wait on them, and that is no fun. Initially the problem was tackled with milestones and Leadership Initiative, but this is a much more direct approach. Now if you miss an Explore on the Mun, it's not gone forever...it will just pop up again with a new objective. Combined with the weights, this gives the player much more control over this line of contracts by decoupling it from RNG a bit.

[federicoaa]

29 minutes ago, regex said:

ALSO PQS OCEAN LAG PLEEEEEASE!

Sorry for the all-caps but my computer would be very appreciative.  Thx.

I have never experienced ocean lag, and I've been playing since 0.21

The but that really bothers me is that when entering an SOI, you can't place a node after PE (you can't click on the orbit line after PE, but you can before PE and then drag the created node where you want to place it)

[regex]

2 minutes ago, federicoaa said:

I have never experienced ocean lag, and I've been playing since 0.21

Good for you, I'm glad you never had to suffer through that!

Ever since I started playing in 0.20 I've experienced lag when looking at the ocean while within 120km of the surface, whether in atmosphere or space, with completely bone-stock installs.

[Endersmens]

Yeah, for ocean lag it was always absolutely awful, I could get real time simulation looking at space, almost real time looking at land, looking at ocean would slow down everything. Changing the subdivision settings did help quite a bit, so maybe it will be easy to reduce from the developer standpoint. Hopefully, anyways.  

[NoMrBond]

Dr_Turkey finally gets going post-chicken and KasperVLD cuts him off, the cruelty!

Since 1.1 will be using a custom version of Edy's VPP, will modders be able to hook into it (any license issues etc?), the current wheel setup is also pretty black magic'y (and a bit fussy) and I'm hoping that will also improve? (i.e. will the wheel hierarchy get simplified or more flexible etc?)

Hopefully one of those meetings is to smuggle get some 3D printed Kerbals on CRS-6 right? 

There was a rather... wry mini-video posted during the last Squadcast regarding the less than optimal stability of the latest Unity release, I don't suppose that situation has improved any from Squad's end?

[OddFunction]

2 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Back to development then: Felipe (HarvesteR) spent another week devoted to fixing bugs that popped up in QA, and has been mostly focussed on wheels, with one particularly ambitious test which consisted of a rover driving into the cargo bay of an aircraft, then flying that aircraft to the island airfield to drive the rover around around.

So does this mean I can send a satellite into Mun orbit, launch a second rocket with a cargo bay, rendezvous with the satellite and put it into the cargo bay (without using a docking port, just free-floating in there) and then be able to fast travel without it clipping through my ship/glitching out/destroying everything? And then be able to land and recover both satellite and rocket?

[Mach_XXII]

2 hours ago, smjjames said:

Wheres a link to that album with the stuff that a clever person managed to find? Or maybe I'll look in general discussion.

Here http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/131077-new-right-click-menus/

[CaLVin-K]

10 minutes ago, Mach_XXII said:

Here http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/131077-new-right-click-menus/

Thanks a lot I've been looking for that. 

[Rhodan]

I really hope that the U5-Transfer and the 64-Bit Client work good, although i have a couple hundred hours playtime, as soon as i build a Space-Station or a base, wich is large enough to drop the framerates below 20, i kinda loose the necessary spirit and give up in frustration. Good Performace>Good Wheels

[mcirish3]

4 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Eventually Felipe managed to overcome this bug, and the same scenario now as expected. It’s possible to drive a rover into a cargo craft, close the cargo bay doors and fly off, then land somewhere else, back it out of the cargo bay, and drive off!

So what about the case where I want to drive my rover around the cargo bay while I am flying?  Remember I am the kind of guy who builds things like this from time to time.  

4 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Exploration contracts can now appear multiple times per planet, with anywhere between one and three much more varied objectives. They adjust intelligently if any objectives happen to be skipped, and they also make use of the player weighted planets system we talked about in previous devnotes, albeit with some constraints to keep within their intelligent linear progression.

Hmm...may be I am reading this wrong but to me this make me nervous.  I don't really want any more "hay land and plant a flag on planet X for the 5th time for no good reason" missions.  To me this sounds like you're going to increase the number of these missions.  If so YUK

Edited February 3, 2016 by mcirish3

[Arsonide]

2 minutes ago, mcirish3 said:

Hmm...may be I am reading this wrong but to me this make me nervous.  I don't really want any more "hay land and plant a flag on planet X for the 5th time for no good reason" missions.  To me this sounds like you're going to increase the number of these missions.  If so YUK

Each objective only ever happens once per body per save. That's why we call'em World First.  The repeatable flag contracts are still around, but they are separate from the World First and Explore contracts. The cool thing is, with weighting in 1.1, after declining a few of these repeatable flag planting contracts, the agencies will take the hint and offer you other things.

[mcirish3]

3 hours ago, Arsonide said:

The thing about this particular change, is that when World First contracts were added they were given this cool logic to determine the order they should be presented in, but they were meant to be unimposing bite sized single bits of content. Explore contracts were basically a package of three or four World Firsts. The objectives overlapped entirely, there were just more of them at once. They were also presented at random times, without the cool logic that World Firsts utilized. This meant players felt pressured to wait on them, and that is no fun. Initially the problem was tackled with milestones and Leadership Initiative, but this is a much more direct approach. Now if you miss an Explore on the Mun, it's not gone forever...it will just pop up again with a new objective. Combined with the weights, this gives the player much more control over this line of contracts by decoupling it from RNG a bit.

I should have read the second page of comments before posting.  (to be fair I usually do).

3 minutes ago, Arsonide said:

Each objective only ever happens once per body per save. That's why we call'em World First.  The repeatable flag contracts are still around, but they are separate from the World First and Explore contracts. The cool thing is, with weighting in 1.1, after declining a few of these repeatable flag planting contracts, the agencies will take the hint and offer you other things.

 OK then yes Woot this will be an improvement.  Now if contracts would only be offered to biomes I have not visited yet, and if science could be one shotted instead of having to repeat at least two time to get it all, then I would be mostly happy!  There are more than enough places to visit, such that, if I don't get it all on the first go I am probably not coming back for it.

[fireblade274]

4 hours ago, katateochi said:

In this scenario was the rover just loose in the cargo bay? or docked?  Do the changes mean that a rover which is docked inside a cargo bay (or even a container made out of panels) will no longer clip through the container once in flight, which is something that often happens atm.
Are wheels any more or less sensitive to being clipped? Mostly talking about having the wheel mounting clipped into something, not the actual wheel.  But there are some nice designs out there which involve putting two wheels so they're slightly clipped (or at least right next to each other).  Will that cause any odd interactions now?

I concur. No more clippage would be welcome

[0111narwhalz]

My greatest hope is that mods can hook into the contract weighting system. Even if stock KSP doesn't have an interface for pushing the weights around, I hope for the ability for a mod to add this. Also, I hope for a mod to be able to replace the weighting algorithm, but this might be far-fetched.

Of course, I don't play career mode much, but the possibilities listed above might change that, if implemented and taken advantage of.

[Dunbaratu]

Is there any chance you can be more specific about what are those UK media interviews the devnotes keep talking about?  (Which newspapers or magazines or TV or Radio shows, etc will they be appearing in, so we can look for them).

 

Edited February 3, 2016 by Steven Mading

[NoMrBond]

12 minutes ago, Steven Mading said:

can be more specific about what are those UK media interviews

This is one;

Not sure if there are more, there might be some from the iGamer conference?

[BrutalRIP]

2 hours ago, Mach_XXII said:

Here http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/131077-new-right-click-menus/

Thank you...You clever person you.

[regex]

1 hour ago, 0111narwhalz said:

My greatest hope is that mods can hook into the contract weighting system. Even if stock KSP doesn't have an interface for pushing the weights around, I hope for the ability for a mod to add this. Also, I hope for a mod to be able to replace the weighting algorithm, but this might be far-fetched.

That would be nice.

E: Even just making some variables and methods public would go a long way to helping out the modder.

Speaking of which, can we have a SpawnAsteroid(Orbit, AsteroidClass) method (or similar) so we don't have pull silly tricks like adding listeners for new vessels before tripping the SpawnAsteroid() black box so we can intercept the new vessel and alter its orbit?

Edited February 3, 2016 by regex

[JohnF]

4 hours ago, regex said:

Good for you, I'm glad you never had to suffer through that!

Ever since I started playing in 0.20 I've experienced lag when looking at the ocean while within 120km of the surface, whether in atmosphere or space, with completely bone-stock installs.

Damn I didn't know that was still a thing! I used to hate that, it almost ruined the game at times because I was so sick of looking up at the sky to launch anything. A few versions ago, KSP changed the way the ocean was rendered (or maybe it was a unity update?) and ocean lag completely vanished for me then. Sad to hear that it persists.

[Frank_G]

Thank you for the update. Nice to see the update getting closer and closer

[Streetwind]

The exploration contract change is really welcome! "Why don't I have an Explore The Mun contract" is one of the more frequently recurring threads in the Gameplay Questions forum. I answered another one just yesterday...

[GeneCash]

5 hours ago, regex said:

Good for you, I'm glad you never had to suffer through that!

Ever since I started playing in 0.20 I've experienced lag when looking at the ocean while within 120km of the surface, whether in atmosphere or space, with completely bone-stock installs.

Yeah, I had that problem really bad with my Intel Integrated Graphics, then I bought an nvidia GTX 960 and installed the latest Debian driver packages. Not really the correct solution though. "There are rabbits in the garden... where's my nuclear weapons?"

[Scotius]

"Lunch with Sarbian." Huh. Hnnnnggghhh.... I. Must. RESIST! Hhhauuhggghhh... STOCK MECHJEB CONFIRMED!!! Ufff. Sorry. Had to be done.