Devnote Tuesday: Many hands make light work!

[Gamax19]

Cool looking forward to seeing the new version.

[Curveball Anders]

1 hour ago, eddiew said:

Is it my imagination, or is an increasingly large % of Squad's dev team made up of modders? Not that I'm criticising, it means they've all been pre-selected for competence and enthusiasm and I like to see their hard work rewarded 

It's actually not unusual, esp with indie studios.

And not only modders, also moderators, QA volunteers and other people active in the community.

Someone inside another indie studio noted that with natural turn over of the crew, their entire workforce would sooner or later be made up of former 'power' users and/or community volunteers ...

It's of course fully natural. Hiring people is always a bit of a gamble. So hiring people that you've already worked with or at least seen their work is a good way to minimize the risk.

 

Edited August 17, 2016 by Curveball Anders

[Majorjim!]

9 hours ago, SQUAD said:

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.

I noticed this and raised a concern in a thread a while ago so it's good to see it finally fixed.

[Red Iron Crown]

2 hours ago, Alewx said:

So when Sarbian is now part of the dev team that means the end for module manager; the really most important thing for the whole mod community?

Oh sure. Like how RealSolarSystem disappeared when @NathanKell was hired. Or how Extraplanetary Launchpads was abandoned after @taniwha came on board. Or how @RoverDude dropped support for his entire suite of mods when he was brought in. 

Sarcasm aside, all of these people seem to have been able to keep up with their modding projects after being hired (though I suspect they don't sleep like normal mortals judging by their productivity). I expect @sarbian will do the same (no pressure though ).

[John FX]

6 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Glad to see the new hires, especially sarbian. Hard to imagine him doing more for KSP than he already has.

True but now the work he does will be stock, a very welcome upgrade...

All I hope is that all his wonderful mods do not suffer as a result. I`d hate to see a unique mod like mechjeb suffer to gain a few more generic bugfixes.

EDIT :

Ah, you posted while I was typing

5 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Oh sure. Like how RealSolarSystem disappeared when @NathanKell was hired. Or how Extraplanetary Launchpads was abandoned after @taniwha came on board. Or how @RoverDude dropped support for his entire suite of mods when he was brought in. 

Sarcasm aside, all of these people seem to have been able to keep up with their modding projects after being hired (though I suspect they don't sleep like normal mortals judging by their productivity). I expect @sarbian will do the same (no pressure though ).

 

This is my hope. Luckily all the modders who joined have a large desire to make KSP the game they want to play, a very good thing indeed.

All in all very good news this week, can`t wait to see the fuel flow overlay.

EDIT 2 :

What would be funny is if they do work on their mods while getting paid by Squad, hehe.

Edited August 17, 2016 by John FX

[Apollo13]

6 hours ago, Starwaster said:

You do know that wheel fixes are coming right? Landing legs use the same code.

Yep, I know that.  And by "wheel fixes are coming", that is vague and nebulous.  Will the fixes be in this iteration?  Or, the next?  Or, the next...

Squad has a well-deserved reputation for allowing the most egregious bugs to propagate from one version to the next.  I'm thinking of the infamous "docking bug"  that lingered forever, because Squad wanted to make lots of shiny new parts.

[Jovus]

3 hours ago, eddiew said:

Is it my imagination, or is an increasingly large % of Squad's dev team made up of modders? Not that I'm criticising, it means they've all been pre-selected for competence and enthusiasm and I like to see their hard work rewarded 

Excellent, the plan continues apace! Soon enough our percentage of Squad devs who like numbers will be high enough to have influence over the design team, and then, on to Phase 2: implement... THE DELTA-V INDICATOR!!!! Muahahahahaha!

And no-one suspects a thing, except that pesky eddiew...

[Curveball Anders]

1 hour ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Sarcasm aside, all of these people seem to have been able to keep up with their modding projects after being hired (though I suspect they don't sleep like normal mortals judging by their productivity). I expect @sarbian will do the same (no pressure though ).

I noticed that during the post-release vacation that all devs where supposed to take they (mostly) stopped answering posts aimed at 'the devs' but they increased their activity in their resp mod threads

Not to mention that @Claw continues to update his Stock Bugfixes mod, while at the same time he's spending his working hours fixing bugs in the core game

[Red Iron Crown]

2 minutes ago, Curveball Anders said:

Not to mention that @Claw continues to update his Stock Bugfixes mod, while at the same time he's spending his working hours fixing bugs in the core game

That's a particularly good synergy there, Claw can test fixes in his mod before integrating them into the core game.

[Malah]

Congrats Sarbian & Nightingale, it will be awesome to see all the fix you could provide for us And an integration on KSP of some of your most useful mods can send KSP on the Moon

No news for the random crash on GNU/Linux? Please

[nightingale]

2 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Sarcasm aside, all of these people seem to have been able to keep up with their modding projects after being hired (though I suspect they don't sleep like normal mortals judging by their productivity).

Sleep is for people without kids.

[Terwin]

Sounds like a lot of good work.

A thought: how much of the bug-fixes/core re-work is currently being driven by the needs of the consoles?(perhaps the PS4 certification is waiting on an 'acceptably stable' build?)
Not that I am at all unhappy with the current focus on performance and stability mind you, just the combination of platform releases(and the inevitable related problems) and a major revision that, thus far, seems to be focusing primarily on performance/stability being temporally proximal suggests that the earlier(platform releases) could be providing some of the impetus for the latter(most of the 1.2 dev-notes being focused on bug-fixes thus far). 

Of course an alternate explanation could be Squad wanting to surprise the community with lots of nifty new features, so the only thing the devs are allowed to talk about are bug-fixes so as not to accidentally reveal anything early.

[fangschuss]

24 minutes ago, nightingale said:

Sleep is for people without kids.

So true...*takes the milk bottle in hope it would sleep again...dream on daddy*

[regex]

16 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Sébastien (Sarbian) and Jeremie (Nightingale)

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?  

16 hours ago, SQUAD said:

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.

@NathanKell must have been feeling my frustration at having to turn off the sounding rocket core in the upper stage to prevent the A-4 core from sucking up all its charge, and then turning it back on while watching fuel levels and do all the other piloting tasks at the same time during staging.

[Redneck]

Heck yeah Sarbian FTW! Alot of very talented people on the dev team now! 

Cant wait for multiplayer in 1.2 now 

Edited August 17, 2016 by Redneck

[JonathanPerregaux]

I love the “default throttle in prelaunch” setting. Can we also have one to always show the navball in the map view?

[HafCoJoe]

WOO! Congrats Sarbian and Nightingale!! It's a pleasure to have you guys on the team

Also, hello Uomocapra. I look forwards to meeting you more after I'm back from Cali.

Edited August 17, 2016 by Avera9eJoe

[pandaman]

Trying hard here not to get too optimistc about how great 1.2 will be (pessimists get nice surprises more often), but it looks like it could be quite an interesting update. I have a real 'feelgood'  feeling about the way the dev team seem to be doing stuff at the moment.   Good to see some more 'obviously qualified' devs joining the team too. 

[Curveball Anders]

5 hours ago, nightingale said:

Sleep is for people without kids.

Who don't spend late nights waiting for them to get home, or at least indicate that they're still alive, playing silly games (or coding).

[0111narwhalz]

11 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

(though I suspect they don't sleep like normal mortals judging by their productivity)

I feel like RoverDude hasn't slept a night in his life. Look at all the glorious mods he's put out in such a short time, and how big these mods are. "Oh, I don't like Kethane. I'm gonna make Regolith. And next week, I'll make Asteroid Recycling Technologies. And then the Packrat after that." 

[Apollo13]

16 hours ago, Arsonide said:

That was a few weeks back when we fully updated VPP and ripped out wheel blocking. We also caught an issue this week where two of the landing legs were not exported with proper layers, which was causing EVA kerbals to blow them up on contact...and probably causing them to be more unstable than they should have been.

Ahhh...this is good to hear!!!!  Especially the EVA Kerbal leg explosion, which I've encountered many times.  Thanks for the update.

[Starwaster]

10 hours ago, nightingale said:

Sleep is for people without kids.

Sleep is for the dead. The living don't have time for sleep.

(though I'm sure that Kai would disagree with me)

Edited August 18, 2016 by Starwaster

[LostOblivion]

I love that you're working on fonts. Fonts looked great back in 0.25 when that intern had overhauled it and made it look consistant across all screens.

[Wjolcz]

On 17.08.2016 at 2:00 AM, SQUAD said:

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.

So the "I got lucky!" mechanic? Please, don't do that.

 

On 17.08.2016 at 2:00 AM, 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.

Nice.

On 17.08.2016 at 2:00 AM, SQUAD said:

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

Am I sensing a career overhaul?

In case I am: please don't include the ice cream strategies. There are better ways to influence the PR of your space program than offering free food for visitors.

[Just Jim]

On 8/16/2016 at 8:00 PM, SQUAD said:

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.

All this, and a new Easter egg?  Awesome!!!  

 

On 8/16/2016 at 8:00 PM, SQUAD said:

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!

Sci-fi and terror?  I like this guy already!