Devnote Tuesday: Many hands make light work!

[SQUAD]

Hello everyone,

As we told you before the team is getting bigger,  we have new team members joining this week and more to come.

The game fonts have been radically overhauled by Mike (Mu) and Brian (Arsonide). Basically they replaced every text object in the entire game using Unity’s raster fonts with something quite similar to vectorized fonts. They have crisp edges and look better, especially at larger sizes, and perform much better than the Unity fonts, also they have a ton of new features, for example we now have inline sprite tags that let us plop currency symbols into the game right from a sprite atlas, and we can apply some cool gradients, drop shadows, textures, and outlines to some of the text with zero performance impact. Other than that Brian also set up a chance for higher level probe cores to detect hidden things in KerbNet which increases with tech level.

An impressively large amount of bugs on the tracker have been crushed, Brian and Bob (Roverdude) spent some time on it this week, Bob also worked on the new antenna features, focusing on the GUI elements and visualization. Steady testing for Steve (Squelch) over the last week. No stand out bugs to report, it’s all been problems that should never see the light of day. As for previously reported issues, the ones that can be fixed have been worked on or brought to attention. Nathan (Claw) spent the week fixing random bugs and running through the user interface, adding keystroke options to typical user input fields. For example, when naming a quick-save, you can now press “Enter” to save the name, or “Escape” to exit out of the quick save dialog without saving. Similar changes have been made for the Mission Recovery, Science, and New Game dialogs.

Two new members have come to the rescue and we saved a couple of bugs to welcome them. Sébastien (Sarbian) and Jeremie (Nightingale) fixed a couple of small bugs to learn more about how things are set up and getting familiar with the code base before diving in head first. Rodrigo  (Roy)  finally got his hands on a couple of bugs from the game, so far he have fixed only minor ones, but they have helped him a great deal to understand how the project is organized.

It’s been a straightforward week for Nathanael (NathanKell) fixing bugs and closing out old issues. One notable fix was that CoL and CoPOffset weren’t being implemented in the way they appeared to be; Starwaster caught this, and they now are offsets from the part origin, not the final center of mass. This should behave better with how they’re used.

He also had time to implement two nice little changes: He added a hibernation mode to probes (where they draw much less power, but don’t allow full control while hibernating) and made the “default throttle in prelaunch” a setting in the settings screen, so no more 50%-throttle-or-take-a-hike during load to the pad. In other news to fully take advantage of the resource priority system we switched ElectricCharge to flow in mode STAGE-PRIORITY-FLOW, so it can have priorities too, and we added a toggle so that tank-tank transfers in flight can be bound by cross-feed rules.

The fuel flow overlay tool Jim (Romfarer) mentioned last week has been completed. It is activatable from the part action menus in VAB/SPH on parts that are resource consumers or providers, i.e. engines and fuel tanks.  In the case of an engine (resource consumer) the overlay shows all fuel tanks (resource providers) which provide fuel to the engine and the paths the fuel go through. For fuel tanks the overlay shows everything the tank is able to deliver it’s fuel to. The graph is split up in requests and deliveries because of the directional fuel lines, for example an engine and a tank which are stack coupled will show different dependencies in the overlay whenever the engine-tank stack is connected to something with a fuel line.

No poem from Mathew (sal_vager) this week, instead after seeing a thread by forum member Razark he brought the matter of Gus Kerman to the devs attention, and while no one can remember who wrote the original line or what it referenced we all agreed that it would be better if it were changed, so we took this opportunity to honour the astronaut Gus Grissom with a new Easter egg in the next release.

A large chunk of this week was the Bon summer vacation in Japan and Bill (taniwha) took advantage of it to lay the groundwork for porting his new targeting code to KSP. As a side benefit of that work, orbit rendering and even orbits themselves should be more efficient as the creation and multiplication of multiple quaternions on every query of the orbit’s state has been replaced by basis vectors and a single matrix transformation, both of which are cached.

On the community side we want to introduce you to our new Community Manager,  Daniele (Uomocapra) he is into video games, music, a wide range of sciency stuff, movies (in particular sci-fi and terror) , marketing and communication.  He will be working together with Kasper (KasperVld) and Andrea (Badie) trying to make new things for the community, so if you have any ideas, please share them with us!

We’re looking for people who livestream KSP on a regular basis on Twitch and who may be interested in joining up with KSPTV.  We’ve got new programming coming up on our official channel as well: NathanKell will start a regular show in the near future, and Akinesis Gaming is back in the picture as well. Be sure to follow the channel on Twitch for all this, and of course for our weekly development update stream on Thursdays.

Kasper will be away travelling most of this week so we’ll have to wait until next week to read all the interesting things he did.

We close with a poem by Bill (taniwha)

Oh the bugs I cause

Do inflict much widespread grief

To all my teammates

But despite the tedium

I shall be victorious!

That’s it for this week: be sure to join our official forums, the KSP subreddit and of course follow our social media to make sure you don’t miss the latest news. Until next time!

[softweir]

Might I be first? That's new!

All good stuff to hear.

[HoloYolo]

1.2 needs to come. NOW. I'm too hyped to wait.

[cubinator]

3 minutes ago, HoloYolo said:

1.2 needs to come. NOW. I'm too hyped to wait.

Remember when we kept saying that about 1.1?

Great to hear of so much progress and great to see new faces join the team!

[klgraham1013]

Welcome Uomocapra!

Still the same amount of hype for 1.2.  Take your time.  I look forward to it.

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Quote

Two new members have come to the rescue and we saved a couple of bugs to welcome them. Sébastien (Sarbian) and Jeremie (Nightingale)

Ooooh, 2 more powerhouse modders on the team, I like it

[fourfa]

Sarbian on staff????!?!?!  HYPE!

[Tinyeth (Taulord100)]

Very impresive work thank you Sqaud.

Edited August 17, 2016 by Tinyeth (Taulord100)
quick correction

[klesh]

Nice report.  I like the fixes, am interested in seeing what the new fonts look like, am excited for a hibernation mode for probes, and think your decision on Gus was a good one.

[Xavven]

The 50% throttle setting on the launchpad finally made a setting, code optimizations, vector based fonts, and hibernation mode on probes!? I like this new dev team. I really like this new dev team. I think they're bringing a new level of professional development to this game that we haven't seen before.

[Superfluous J]

56 minutes ago, SQUAD said:

In the case of an engine (resource consumer) the overlay shows all fuel tanks (resource providers) which provide fuel to the engine and the paths the fuel go through. For fuel tanks the overlay shows everything the tank is able to deliver it’s fuel to. The graph is split up in requests and deliveries because of the directional fuel lines, for example an engine and a tank which are stack coupled will show different dependencies in the overlay whenever the engine-tank stack is connected to something with a fuel line.

Pics or it didn't happen

 

[Iamsodarncool]

Any news on Porkjet's rocket parts overhaul?

[Alshain]

1 hour ago, SQUAD said:

The game fonts have been radically overhauled by Mike (Mu) and Brian (Arsonide). Basically they replaced every text object in the entire game using Unity’s raster fonts with something quite similar to vectorized fonts. They have crisp edges and look better, especially at larger sizes, and perform much better than the Unity fonts, also they have a ton of new features, for example we now have inline sprite tags that let us plop currency symbols into the game right from a sprite atlas, and we can apply some cool gradients, drop shadows, textures, and outlines to some of the text with zero performance impact.

This is like a perfect reason to show a screenshot... and yet

[Iamsodarncool]

40 minutes ago, Waxing_Kibbous said:

Ooooh, 2 more powerhouse modders on the team, I like it

Indeed. There are several mods from each I'd love to see become stock.

Edited August 17, 2016 by Iamsodarncool

[Alshain]

6 minutes ago, Iamsodarncool said:

Indeed. There are several mods from each I'd love to become stock.

I find it interesting that both the new members develop Scripting API mods (Contract Configurator and Module Manager).  I wonder if that's just a happy coincidence or if it means something.  After all, the only possible kind of mod you would ever see on a console is a script.  If MM & CC became stock, limited console modding might become a thing.

Edited August 17, 2016 by Alshain

[SpacedCowboy]

( Maximum input has been exceeded )

Best Dev notes in a long time

[lurkoholic]

Yay! New fonts!  The current ones are kinda "meh" if they aren't scaled to 100% or 150%.  I tried making a lot of the gui smaller but ended up squinting and leaning toward my monitor.

 

Spoiler

It's definitely not because I'm getting old and might need glasses...

 

[Iamsodarncool]

Just now, Alshain said:

I find it interesting that both the new members develop API mods (Contract Configurator and Module Manager).  I wonder if that's just a happy coincidence or if it means something.

It would be really nice if their API mods became stock, so many mods rely on them... the issue with mods like that in a game that gets frequent updates is that if the creator abandons the mod then the other modders are boned. As someone who still plays games and their mods from the 80s and 90s I'm a big believer in preserving games and their mods as long as possible; I'd love to play KSP with my grandkids, and it'd be nice if when that time comes we can use all the mods I did back in the 2010s.

[Alshain]

Just now, Iamsodarncool said:

It would be really nice if their API mods became stock, so many mods rely on them... the issue with mods like that in a game that gets frequent updates is that if the creator abandons the mod then the other modders are boned. As someone who still plays games and their mods from the 80s and 90s I'm a big believer in preserving games and their mods as long as possible; I'd love to play KSP with my grandkids, and it'd be nice if when that time comes we can use all the mods I did back in the 2010s.

Yes, I agree. I edited it in after you quoted, but the bigger implication is the possibility of some modding on the console version if both those mods become stock.

[GeneCash]

Sarbian? Sounds like a new guy... does he know anything about modding? (grabs his AR-202 module and *RUNS*)

Man, all I wanted was my wheels fixed... but it looks like I'm getting a whole new game. I sho' ain't complainin'!

I don't know whether to get on the hype train or the "I want it NOW!" whaaaambulance.

[SpacedCowboy]

6 minutes ago, lurkoholic said:

Yay! New fonts!  The current ones are kinda "meh" if they aren't scaled to 100% or 150%.  I tried making a lot of the gui smaller but ended up squinting and leaning toward my monitor.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

It's definitely not because I'm getting old and might need glasses...

 

I hear and don't see you there!

 

[AlphaMensae]

49 minutes ago, fourfa said:

Sarbian on staff????!?!?!  HYPE!

Nyan Cat mysteriously starts appearing around the KSC....

 

 

[AlamoVampire]

I am beyond ecstatic that the issue of Gus Kerman is taken care of. 

As to the rest of the bits and bobs mentioned, I am glad the throttle things an option now. Never grasped why it was set to anything beyond 0% before launch. Something about new players or something but we all gotta learn how throttle works anyway lol

[AlphaMensae]

1 hour ago, SQUAD said:

For example, when naming a quick-save, you can now press “Enter” to save the name, or “Escape” to exit out of the quick save dialog without saving. Similar changes have been made for the Mission Recovery, Science, and New Game dialogs.

About time this happened!

Why this was never done a long time ago is quite puzzling...

[FullMetalMachinist]

41 minutes ago, Xavven said:

The 50% throttle setting on the launchpad finally made a setting, code optimizations, vector based fonts, and hibernation mode on probes!? I like this new dev team. I really like this new dev team. I think they're bringing a new level of professional development to this game that we haven't seen before.

Honesty I think it has less to do with who is on the team, and more is the simple fact that there are more people on the team. More bodies mean that there is more dev time to add more of these little quality of life things. 

Now, I'm not degrading the efforts of the newer/current team, just saying that it's bigger, and simple numbers say that more things are likely to get done quicker.