Devnote Wednesday: Tuesday Edition

[EwingKang]

 

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Brian (Arsonide) has been hard at work tackling various issues surrounding science labs, and in particular the use of more than one lab at a time. When you fill up your first lab and still have data to spare....

WoooooooHooooooo!!!
It's great to know that a science station or surface base would work as a player would expect!
 

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Devnote Wednesday: Tuesday Edition

It's always Devnote Wednesday for us who live in the East hemisphere (and Thrusday edition occationally). Even though I don't really have time to play the game since a few months ago (also working on my thesis too), the devnotes are still the must-haves for each week. You've made my day. THANKYOU!

Edited February 24, 2016 by EwingKang
spelling

[federicoaa]

3 hours ago, SQUAD said:

manoeuvre nodes can now be placed properly on hyperbolic trajectories

Finally, thank you!

[NoMrBond]

20 minutes ago, NathanKell said:

Yeah, that thing.

I AM UNREASONABLY EXCITED ABOUT THIS

Otherwise is it possible to connect the varied thrust across cluster engine transforms to steering in some way to simulate something like the XRS-2200, which used differential thrust instead of gimballing?

[NathanKell]

A plugin could do that quite simply. It's not something stock supports however.

[AlextheBodacious]

Who is writing this?

[juanml82]

9 minutes ago, NoMrBond said:

I AM UNREASONABLY EXCITED ABOUT THIS

Otherwise is it possible to connect the varied thrust across cluster engine transforms to steering in some way to simulate something like the XRS-2200, which used differential thrust instead of gimballing?

Mechjeb has a hidden differential throttle setting, but I'm not sure how much it would work in this case, since most engines have gimbal already

[lextacy]

For those who are devestated by the staging in VAB ovehaul being cut from the release , I have a inteirm solution for you guys.

 

1. Make your payload in a seperate .craft file.

2. Make note of the # of stages your payload is.

3. Drop this as a subassembly

4. Open/Make up your launcher craft in a new file

5. Leave the amount of stages in step #2 above all your launcher stages

example here is color coded. Blue is anything that is payload, and red is anything launcher/lift vehicle

 

payload :

stage 0

stage 1

stage 2

stage 3

Launcher/Payload  Together in one ship. Use merge or subassemblie

stage 0  leave intentionally blank

stage 1 leave intentionally blank

stage 2 leave intentionally blank

stage 3 leave intentionally blank

stage 4 payload decouple

stage 5 fairings

stage 6 decoupler/2nd stage

stage 7  main engine  ect

 

6. Merge the subassemble you made earlier

 

No more clustercrapp of scrambled staging when merging in the VAB. It is very important to make those dummy stages. The reason this works is the game tries to inherit the stage numbers and order from the crafts.

PROFIT!!!

Edited February 24, 2016 by lextacy

[cubinator]

3 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Devnote Wednesday: Tuesday Edition

Rep'd just for that.

Soon(tm) feels like it's a fixed distance away, like those stairs in Super Mario 64...I know it's getting closer, though. Right?  Right???

[Majorjim!]

2 hours ago, Redneck said:

nothing a quick patch after release cant take care of

It sounds like they will never fix that bug. I have seen it before but I know others are more used to it, anyone know how game breaking it is in certain circumstances? So I can avoid them!

 Thanks for the hard work @SQUAD we eagerly await 1.1!

[AlanP]

Next Week

Devnote Monday: Tuesday Edition

[MrHappyFace]

2 hours ago, Mitchz95 said:

Awesome. What about re-entry? Will it fix that as well?

Also, what does pqs stand for?

PQS stands for Planetary Quadtree Sphere. It's the terrain system KSP uses. It allows the game to store the entire planet with a relatively small amount of RAM by making the terrain farther away have less detail.

Unfortunately, this has the effect of, when you're moving fast over the terrain, lagging out the game because it has to constantly rebuild the terrain. I doubt the multi-threaded physics would fix the terrain lag though. There's also the heat/aero simulations that have to be run which are also largely unaffected by the multi-threaded physics upgrade. AFAIK, the multi-threaded physics really only affect rigidbody interactions, like the joints between parts, and collision. Hope that answered your questions.

Side Note: Terrain updates don't happen during on-rails warp which is why you don't lag like crazy when doing 1,000x warp in low orbit. It's also part of why the game lags when you drop out of time warp, because the terrain has to make up for all of the changes it skipped while you were in warp.

Edited February 24, 2016 by MrHappyFace
added more physics

[bigyihsuan]

4 hours ago, SQUAD said:

PEGI 3

Yes, absolutely massive explosions and possible... certain long and thin rockets is worth a rating that's about equal to ESRB E.

Okay. But the devnotes are still good!

[mcirish3]

AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!  *Running around with my hair on fire waiting for the Hype train to pass and 1.1 to arrive.*  Hoping to be reading "We are in experimentals" by this time next week. AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH IT BURNS!!!!!

[Alshain]

33 minutes ago, bigyihsuan said:

Yes, absolutely massive explosions and possible... certain long and thin rockets is worth a rating that's about equal to ESRB E.

Okay. But the devnotes are still good!

ESRB E and PEGI 3 are not equal.  They seek to establish the same goal but for the culture and acceptance of different parts of the world.  (Very) Generally speaking, Europeans are a little more relaxed on things than the Americas.  Not that KSP wouldn't get E rated, in fact I'm almost certain it would, but just saying they aren't equal.  I don't live in Europe so I wouldn't ever base buying decisions for my kids based on their standards.

Edited February 24, 2016 by Alshain

[Mitchz95]

1 hour ago, MrHappyFace said:

Unfortunately, this has the effect of, when you're moving fast over the terrain, lagging out the game because it has to constantly rebuild the terrain.

Mine lags even if I'm just sitting on the launchpad.

1 hour ago, MrHappyFace said:

Side Note: Terrain updates don't happen during on-rails warp which is why you don't lag like crazy when doing 1,000x warp in low orbit.

Mine does. If my camera is facing the planet, it's a slideshow until I point away. Worse at low altitudes, but it never fully goes away.

[likke_A_boss]

For all those asking, it has been scientifically proven the the experimentals for 1.1 will begin on K +1, with K begin the day you read this.

[CaLVin-K]

Ive got to say all of these bug fixes are shaping up to make 1.1.x look like an extremely attractive update, very excited for this to release. Thanks SQUAD!

I also have a question about how PhysX 3.3 handles physics under the hood, its been said my many people that Unity 5.x will finally bring multi threading to KSP. This confuses me as Unity 4.6.x already multi threads, the trouble is that all physics calculations have to be handled by a single CPU core, so is that the problem Unity 5.x/PhysX 3.3 fixes? is physics able to be handled by more that one CPU core? Or is something else changing?

Edited February 24, 2016 by CaLVin-K

[wyzwon]

6 hours ago, KasperVld said:

Less broken, definitely. This is just one issue that we won't tackle because it would introduce a range of other problems.

I don't want to drag on the one piece of bad news for the week but do you plan to re-address it in the future? Also i'm just going by the name here but I assume this is about the bug that causes strange crashing when removing a part, hitting undo, and placing the held copy elsewhere? I have lost a few large craft files to this bug so it seems to me like at least a quick fix like deleting the held version when when hitting undo is warranted for the headaches it can save (maybe accompanied be a little message reminding people that a proper duplicate option exists).

[wyzwon]

1 hour ago, Mitchz95 said:

Mine lags even if I'm just sitting on the launchpad.

Mine does. If my camera is facing the planet, it's a slideshow until I point away. Worse at low altitudes, but it never fully goes away.

If you don't mind me asking, how much ram do you have? 

[Tantalus]

7 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Well, we certainly hope that our message of “we’re close, and we’re getting closer” from the past months has gotten boring yet.

You hope it has got boring? Really? 

BTT, great news again, sounds as 1.1 will get close to being perfect (in terms of how perfect a computer game can actually be). 

 

 

[boborene]

Thanks god, squad is still alive. I though you all are dead

[Draradech]

2 hours ago, Mitchz95 said:

Mine lags even if I'm just sitting on the launchpad.

Mine does. If my camera is facing the planet, it's a slideshow until I point away. Worse at low altitudes, but it never fully goes away.

What graphics card are you using? If it's a slightly older one, try disabling SM3 (shader model 3) Terrain Shaders in the graphics settings. It will look a bit worse, but it helped my framerate a lot when playing on my laptop.

[Mitchz95]

2 minutes ago, Draradech said:

What graphics card are you using? If it's a slightly older one, try disabling SM3 (shader model 3) Terrain Shaders in the graphics settings. It will look a bit worse, but it helped my framerate a lot when playing on my laptop.

Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB.

[_stilgar_]

8 hours ago, SQUAD said:

There are of course plenty of issues that we can address: Brian (Arsonide) has been hard at work tackling various issues surrounding science labs, and in particular the use of more than one lab at a time. When you fill up your first lab and still have data to spare, that data now properly “bounces” to the next one.

This is awesome! One of the things I'd be waiting for in 1.1. 

I'll finally be able to build massive Science Ships, slowly cruising through the Kerbol system, producing lots and lots of science (one big ship with 12 labs sounds like more fun than 12 ships with one)

[Streetwind]

1 hour ago, Mitchz95 said:

Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB.

Yeah, that's definitely to blame on the videocard, not the game. I'm willing to bet money on the fact that people with dedicated graphics hardware don't see this problem.

(For example, I've never seen it happen and I've been playing since v0.23, using both Nvidia and AMD gpus during that time.)

Edited February 24, 2016 by Streetwind