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KSP Weekly: A short briefing


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Welcome to KSP Weekly, everyone! This week we have not only seen a big leap forward in the various projects we’re working on, but we’ve also been struck by luck and given a double load of astronomical events with a penumbral lunar eclipse and comet 45P dashing past some 11.9 million kilometers above Earth. We’re all space enthusiasts and such events get us excited, we hope you can catch them both. But we’re here to talk about everything Kerbal, so without further ado, let’s begin.

This week’s edition will be a bit short, since a great deal of the work we’ve done is related to a project you’ll learn about soon. Despite that there are many other things that kept us busy this week.

The QA team has been busy, as you would expect: testing, testing, and testing again until something breaks. Hearts, minds, PCs… oh and of course world firsts. We do this to ensure that the final product comes out in the best shape it can possibly be. And even though some of our colleagues have the KSPedia burned into their retinas by now, QA is one of the pillars of development and it is essential when releasing any game. We would also like welcome our new localization volunteers this week, and they will be joining the hard working checking and correcting team. Thank you!

And talking about broken hearts and PCs…this week sal_vager shared this little poem with us. Why? I wonder…

House has old wiring

Boom goes my PC

But continuing testing

Reading KSPedia by VNC

On the development front activities included spreadsheets, spreadsheets and even more spreadsheets! Checking and finding the strings that need to be translated is a long and not so fun task. In between that it’s been mostly code reviews, bug fixing and KSPedia updates with more of the same planned in the next week.

Programmers also had fun tweaking UIs to make the languages fit. Pop Quiz: Which Language seems to take up the most room? Answer: Spanish.

There  was also some bug fixing here and there including some bugs related to the Flagpole (outside the Astronaut Complex) destruction/upgrades and interactions with the Astronaut Complex. They also fixed a bug related to the Ablator darkening on heat shields. The heat shields do not darken correctly or persist correct in 1.2.2, but now they are fixed! More work on the Runway seam upgrades/fixes, they are coming along and the T3 Runway is complete. Just the T2 Runway to go. Investigations continue on the terrain seams but we have made some progress. We want to give special thanks to swjr-swis, klgraham1013, and KroShan for submitting the saves. All of the saves are helping us figure out what the problem is and will give us lots of places to test the fixes.

But that’s not all, Roy has been working on the Kerbal name generator: the English, Spanish, Russian and Japanese versions are coming along nicely, but he is still having some troubles with the Chinese version. The volunteers have been extremely helpful with their insight for this task, too.

Refactoring in the Localization branch using the Lingoona grammar continues: plural/singular tokens, numeric parameters. We’ve also fixed non-Localizable strings containing tags like bold, color (in general font style) and tested across several languages.

In other news, our friends at Blitworks keep on working on the console update. We’ve already started to test the first builds, there is still some fixing and polishing to do, but it is looking good.

Finally our artists keep working on the retopology of some animation models, as well as fixing KSPedia issues and finishing the Russian version of the KSPedia. Who’d guess that adapting characters would be so complicated.

That’s it for this week. Be sure to join us on our official forums, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Stay tuned for more exciting and upcoming news!

Happy launchings!

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I honor the great efforts of the QA, Dev, and Art teams. But before something breaks it needs a pause. Only steady work reaches great achievements. But that is only if there are people who do a steady job.

Have a nice weekend for SQUAD and the universe!:D

Edited by EBOSHI
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Great to see increasing amounts of actual information in these things! Also great to see people's complaints being addressed, especially the terrain seams. Although honestly one of the things I'm looking forward to most is messing with  Kerbal names in different languages.

I do notice we're back to hyping up the big super-secret project though. I still think the tease-and-disappoint game isn't the best way to go--even if it's a great feature I suspect a lot of people will be disappointed it wasn't the great feature they were hoping for. Just please make sure it's an actual gameplay feature and not, like, a port for the TI-83 or something.

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What ever happened to the barn shed tier 0 that was teased pre-1.0? Maybe that's the super big secret thing, a whole new early game progression! Including a tech tree re-balance for flight first, which would make a whole lot more sense!

One can only dream......or hype....

HYPE HYPE HYPE!

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Thanks for the console updates. Really appreciate any small tidbits we get, it's been a long wait to get my hands on a build that will not corrupt.  Any chance you could confirm that the text size is being changed? Please don't forget we are sitting on our couches ànd not on top of a monitor.

Keep up the good work, really really looking forward to getting my hands on a version that does the game justice 

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17 minutes ago, bonyetty said:

"T3 Runway is complete. Just the T2 Runway to go." Does this mean more runways in KSP?

No they're talking about the two KSC runway versions when you upgrade in career mode.

And nobody say there are actually 3 of them. We all know the level 1 runway is neither level nor a runway.

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"A project we will learn about soon"... I like the sound of that.

1.3, soon to be released, sounds like a great little update. Localization will be nice to spread the game even further (let's hope it will take off in Mexico, without much knowledge of the Mexican game industry I'm willing to bet that it's one of the most successful games ever produced there, so hopefully translation will give it further domestic success and a national holiday as well. Meanwhile, SQUAD seems to be promising that there is more on the way after the current update is out. After 1.2, I think many of us were left with a bit of a "well, now what?" feeling as we had no idea what the next thing for the game would be (or even if there were more features on the way; there were some shenanigans with most of the staff signing off for reasons that weren't entirely clear to us). Then we learned about localization. Now 1.3 is on the horizon, and we're already being reassured that it won't be the end of development either. I wouldn't be surprised if Squad would lift the shroud off the new feature, and then hint at something else just before releasing 1.4, so we have yet more things to look forward to. The knowledge that development will continue adds a feeling of comfort to us as players, we're not forgotten and developers are still on board.

 

I must admit that my faith in Squad has wavered at some points, and I was even wondering if it was all coming apart at some point, but now I'm less worried than ever. KSP is still being worked on and taken care of. And I prefer this strategy of teasing future features before the previous one has shipped, so it's made clear that work is still ongoing and will continue for some time.

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On 2/11/2017 at 1:36 AM, SQUAD said:

Which Language seems to take up the most room? Answer: Spanish.

We have all the big words. :D(although Dutch with their why-use-an-entire-sentence-when-we-can-cram-all-meaning-into-one-compound-word strategy could win at scrabble)

 

On 2/11/2017 at 1:36 AM, SQUAD said:

including some bugs related to the Flagpole

That's yet another mention of bug fixes for the flagpole. Who are these people that spent their KSP time up or around the flagpole, to find all these bugs? And what are they doing there? Questions!

 

On 2/11/2017 at 1:36 AM, SQUAD said:

More work on the Runway seam upgrades/fixes, they are coming along and the T3 Runway is complete. Just the T2 Runway to go.

The landing gear have proposed a special medal to honour for those who have done so much in ending the needless loss of wheels during take offs.

 

On 2/11/2017 at 1:36 AM, SQUAD said:

Investigations continue on the terrain seams but we have made some progress.

Thanks, anything to get it resolved will be appreciated. In most cases it appears to be a cosmetic flaw 'only' (still annoying because they didn't exist before), but what I noticed after driving around is that the size of the gap is not directly related to the damage they can cause: sometimes almost invisibly fine gaps blew up the tyres even at a snail's pace, while some bigger ones could be driven over, even at full speed, without the suspension noticing them.

So has anyone done some regression testing with the saves you have now to see in what version the seams first appeared? Wouldn't that help to narrow down what was changed that caused them to appear?

 

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I have several thousand hours on KSP.

I play the game as it was intended to be played.

I played in vanilla.
I designed ships for individual roles.
Often spending hours on a single design.
Interplanetary ships were built in orbit using modules.

I haven't played since November of last year.

Three months ago I reported a Spontaneous Explosion bug in the Bug Tracker. http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/13314
I provided all relevant files as requested.

I explained that this bug hits me on most of my games at some point.

The only response I received was "There is certainly something not right here, and there appears to be log entries that haven't been seen before in any tests, or indeed other reports, so this could well be an edge case."

I tested this 'Edge case' save game in both Linux and Windows and the bug exists in both platforms.

The report hasn't even been 'Confirmed'

I am most definitely a KSP addict.
As this has caused me to stop playing KSP for three months and I find I don't need a 'fix' quite as much as I did last month then I suppose I am on my way to being cured of my addiction. A silver lining perhaps?

I posted this here because each week I check this forum for fixes and updates, hoping against hope that this bug would have been addressed. I dare not look at the rest of the forum as I once did, for fear that it would start the cravings again. Alas this post is doing that very thing. Perhaps I posted it here in the hope that an actual Developer might see it and do something wonderful?

I'll check again next week (Probably before too) to see if there is any hope. If not, after another week I must start getting used to the idea that it's 'Game Over.'

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To summarise: Space!, (Secrets), a couple of bugs fixed, localisation remains top priority, Animation!

There, I compressed your weekly into a tweet that conveys the same basic information.

TANGENTIAL SUGGESTION:  Every week it seems like that exact same messaging. Different words in a different order, but still the same.  Can someone please write a twitter-bot that auto-magically generates a KSP Weekly outburst? If so, then a companion-bot could also be created that mimics the usual community response.  Then we can all just ignore everything and play more KSP.

More importantly: Thank you for your continued efforts, regardless of my doubtful commentary. Keep in mind that sarcasm is my most efficient form of feedback.

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1 hour ago, Wallygator said:

To summarise: Space!, (Secrets), a couple of bugs fixed, localisation remains top priority, Animation!

Write another one, just like the other one (to paraphrase a song from a long time ago)

Can`t wait for this update to be out of the way so it will be obvious whether any real development is still ongoing or if we should be shifting our gaze to modmakers for features.

That seems to be the only sort of real confirmation we get, a sufficiently long period of time with no mention of a feature, super secret or otherwise.

DV readout? Happening! (until it just stops being mentioned)

Multiplayer? Happening! (until it just stops being mentioned)

Gas Planet 2? Happening! (until it just stops being mentioned)

etc...

I`m sure there are many other examples.

Not knocking what has been done, just the way we learn about what will not be happening...

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