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KSP Weekly: Trekking the Stars


SQUAD

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Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. This week we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the twin Voyager spacecrafts, the longest-lived and farthest spacecrafts humanity has ever built. We talked about them in various occasions, and we invite you to check out the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Voyager Website if you are eager to keep learning about their importance, implications and achievements, as well as to look at their huge and amazing media gallery (they have cool commemorative wallpapers, too). Coincidentally, today also marks the 51st anniversary of one of the most beloved science-fiction franchises, we are talking, of course, about Star Trek. The series, created, produced and written by Gene Roddenberry, originally followed the interstellar adventures of Captain James T Kirk and his crew aboard the starship USS Enterprise, a space exploration vessel, built by the interstellar federal republic United Federation of Planets in the twenty-third century. Although the Original Series only aired for three seasons and had its flaws (or cheese factor), it spawned an animated series, thirteen movies and five additional series, as well as, innumerable novels, games, comics, toys and even a themed attraction in Las Vegas. A definitive worldwide cult phenomenon. Star Trek has not only a complex mythology with its own full-fledged constructed language (Klingon), but through the various dilemmas that the protagonists faced in the story lines, it managed to allegorize many contemporary realities and issues, such as war and peace, the value of personal loyalty, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, religion, human rights, sexism, feminism, and the role of technology, making it notable for its progressive civil right stances. Some of us at the KSP HQ are trekkies and we stand by the values that this great and long-lived franchise has been trying to spread since the sixties. In the hopes that Kerbin may sometime join the United Federation of Planets, we salute you: Live long and prosper. But now let’s move on to KSP development news.

For starters, this week’s activities included working through the bug reports for update 1.3.1, and some good progress has been made, thanks to the great information you have been providing. So a huge shout-out to everyone who has been helping us out with feedback! For example, some devs have been working on and implementing improvements for the landed vessels coming off rails issue in 1.3.1. The issue caused landers to bounce into the air on low G words when you switch to them, and it has been much improved. Single landed vessels do spawn quite nicely and adjust themselves to be a few inches above the floor before gently dropping, but the QA Team is thorough and they started testing various scenarios, like: What happens if a whole base is built? What happens if that base is built on uneven ground? Well, the whole base appears several metres in the air before descending to the floor in a display that could best be described as “heart stopping”. That’s what happens. But don’t you worry, our devs are still working hard to get that improved for the next revision.

The QA team has also been busy testing the revised Control Schemes on consoles. As previously mentioned, we now have presets, and these need to be thoroughly checked and verified individually. As with any change, some bugs have been introduced, so the team is reporting those, as well as giving constant feedback on the new design. Additionally some other bugs have been addressed. A couple of examples include a bug that caused engine particles for the CR-7 RAPIER engine to disappear, and similarly one where aero and thermal effects disappeared when zooming out.

In other news, the crusade towards the creation of the Making History Expansion continues, and this week wasn’t without its highlights. This week’s activities included fixing some bugs, polishing already delivered functional stories and work on the core code changes required to support other launch sites, that is, the ‘Mobile Launch Pads’ you’ll be able to spawn when creating missions. Further implementation for the expansion’s Graphic Action Pane also took place, specifically on the feature that will allow Mission Creators to place targets on and above surfaces, yes, above surfaces, too. The feature is still being worked on, but basically we found a solution to place targets on three-dimensional spaces via sphere-shaped targets. This feature, for example, could be useful to design courses to be followed by vessels on missions, maybe even races! It will be up to you to decide how to make the most of the various tools we’re working on and you’ll have at your disposal.

The team is also working on letting Mission Creators to add scoring nodes to their mission canvas, as well as letting them tweak their settings. The Mission Creator will be able to drag these scoring nodes from the sidebar and dock them to specific objective nodes. This feature could have several implications, for instance, let’s say that in your mission you want to have players go through various objectives before succeeding, and that the final score to be a summatory of the player’s performance on each individual objective in the overall mission, well, you get the idea. The devs also completed work to allow mission creators to place asteroids into their missions and place them in all the same situations as you can a vessel.

On the artistic side of development, the team started to work on the geometry and the textures of a new  LR-91-inspired Engine, as well as on the textures for the MK 1-3 command mode’s IVA. Hopefully we’ll have something to show soon, but for now you’ll have to be patient.

And last but not least, we have an announcement to make. We are working on localizing the game to further languages, specifically German, French, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese. We are still at very early stages of the localization process, but we are sharing this news because some players might notice that on the Language Tab of the game’s Properties on Steam there will be other languages listed aside from the ones we have already released. This change is for testing purposes and these won’t be available for use, yet.

Remember that you still have another week to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - Eve Speed Challenge.  So go check it out and share your creations!

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 and development updates!

Happy launchings!

PS: We are all fine (and our families) and operating normally after the Earthquake that hit Mexico last night. Mexico City was largely unaffected, but unfortunately other states in the south of the country weren’t that lucky. Our thoughts and prayers are with them.

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11 minutes ago, SQUAD said:

tumblr_inline_ovzaulAgP11rr2wit_540.png

Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. This week we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the twin Voyager spacecrafts, the longest-lived and farthest spacecrafts humanity has ever built. We talked about them in various occasions, and we invite you to check out the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Voyager Website if you are eager to keep learning about their importance, implications and achievements, as well as to look at their huge and amazing media gallery (they have cool commemorative wallpapers, too). Coincidentally, today also marks the 51st anniversary of one of the most beloved science-fiction franchises, we are talking, of course, about Star Trek. The series, created, produced and written by Gene Roddenberry, originally followed the interstellar adventures of Captain James T Kirk and his crew aboard the starship USS Enterprise, a space exploration vessel, built by the interstellar federal republic United Federation of Planets in the twenty-third century. Although the Original Series only aired for three seasons and had its flaws (or cheese factor), it spawned an animated series, thirteen movies and five additional series, as well as, innumerable novels, games, comics, toys and even a themed attraction in Las Vegas. A definitive worldwide cult phenomenon. Star Trek has not only a complex mythology with its own full-fledged constructed language (Klingon), but through the various dilemmas that the protagonists faced in the story lines, it managed to allegorize many contemporary realities and issues, such as war and peace, the value of personal loyalty, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, religion, human rights, sexism, feminism, and the role of technology, making it notable for its progressive civil right stances. Some of us at the KSP HQ are trekkies and we stand by the values that this great and long-lived franchise has been trying to spread since the sixties. In the hopes that Kerbin may sometime join the United Federation of Planets, we salute you: Live long and prosper. But now let’s move on to KSP development news.

For starters, this week’s activities included working through the bug reports for update 1.3.1, and some good progress has been made, thanks to the great information you have been providing. So a huge shout-out to everyone who has been helping us out with feedback! For example, some devs have been working on and implementing improvements for the landed vessels coming off rails issue in 1.3.1. The issue caused landers to bounce into the air on low G words when you switch to them, and it has been much improved. Single landed vessels do spawn quite nicely and adjust themselves to be a few inches above the floor before gently dropping, but the QA Team is thorough and they started testing various scenarios, like: What happens if a whole base is built? What happens if that base is built on uneven ground? Well, the whole base appears several metres in the air before descending to the floor in a display that could best be described as “heart stopping”. That’s what happens. But don’t you worry, our devs are still working hard to get that improved for the next revision.

The QA team has also been busy testing the revised Control Schemes on consoles. As previously mentioned, we now have presets, and these need to be thoroughly checked and verified individually. As with any change, some bugs have been introduced, so the team is reporting those, as well as giving constant feedback on the new design. Additionally some other bugs have been addressed. A couple of examples include a bug that caused engine particles for the CR-7 RAPIER engine to disappear, and similarly one where aero and thermal effects disappeared when zooming out.

In other news, the crusade towards the creation of the Making History Expansion continues, and this week wasn’t without its highlights. This week’s activities included fixing some bugs, polishing already delivered functional stories and work on the core code changes required to support other launch sites, that is, the ‘Mobile Launch Pads’ you’ll be able to spawn when creating missions. Further implementation for the expansion’s Graphic Action Pane also took place, specifically on the feature that will allow Mission Creators to place targets on and above surfaces, yes, above surfaces, too. The feature is still being worked on, but basically we found a solution to place targets on three-dimensional spaces via sphere-shaped targets. This feature, for example, could be useful to design courses to be followed by vessels on missions, maybe even races! It will be up to you to decide how to make the most of the various tools we’re working on and you’ll have at your disposal.

The team is also working on letting Mission Creators to add scoring nodes to their mission canvas, as well as letting them tweak their settings. The Mission Creator will be able to drag these scoring nodes from the sidebar and dock them to specific objective nodes. This feature could have several implications, for instance, let’s say that in your mission you want to have players go through various objectives before succeeding, and that the final score to be a summatory of the player’s performance on each individual objective in the overall mission, well, you get the idea. The devs also completed work to allow mission creators to place asteroids into their missions and place them in all the same situations as you can a vessel.

On the artistic side of development, the team started to work on the geometry and the textures of a new LR-91 Engine, as well as on the textures for the MK 1-3 command mode’s IVA. Hopefully we’ll have something to show soon, but for now you’ll have to be patient.

And last but not least, we have an announcement to make. We are working on localizing the game to further languages, specifically German, French, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese. We are still at very early stages of the localization process, but we are sharing this news because some players might notice that on the Language Tab of the game’s Properties on Steam there will be other languages listed aside from the ones we have already released. This change is for testing purposes and these won’t be available for use, yet.

Remember that you still have another week to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - Eve Speed Challenge.  So go check it out and share your creations!

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 and development updates!

Happy launchings!

PS: We are all fine (and our families) and operating normally after the Earthquake that hit Mexico last night. Mexico City was largely unaffected, but unfortunately other states in the south of the country weren’t that lucky. Our thoughts and prayers are with them.

I love the new :)

+

I would like the squad team to be correct :)

Edited by SamBelanger
:)
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9 minutes ago, SQUAD said:

PS: We are all fine (and our families) and operating normally after the Earthquake that hit Mexico last night. Mexico City was largely unaffected, but unfortunately other states in the south of the country weren’t that lucky. Our thoughts and prayers are with them.

This is the most important part! Good to hear everyone there is safe! :)

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14 minutes ago, klesh said:

Glad you're all safe.

14 minutes ago, SamBelanger said:

I love the new :)

+

I would like the squad team to be correct :)

13 minutes ago, Just Jim said:

This is the most important part! Good to hear everyone there is safe! :)

At least, the squad team is okay and safe :)

Edited by SamBelanger
I'm touched!
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1 hour ago, SamBelanger said:

We are working on localizing the game to further languages

Eh. Ehhhh. I hope this won't take up development time as most of the code has already been written. New languages are great to bring the game to new countries, but I'm going to be really dissapointed if 1.4 is Away with Words Part 2.

Glad to here you weren't affected by the hurricane!

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9 hours ago, SQUAD said:

For example, some devs have been working on and implementing improvements for the landed vessels coming off rails issue in 1.3.1. The issue caused landers to bounce into the air on low G words when you switch to them, and it has been much improved.

This will be something to look forward to. I have had two bases tear themselves apart on Minmus due to that effect.

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15 hours ago, SQUAD said:

We are working on localizing the game to further languages, specifically German, French, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Yay! Very excited about this ! Playing this game in your native language would be great :)

 

PS: Nice to hear that everyone is ok

Edited by Nightfury
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18 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

What? No plans to localize to Klingon yet?!? :cool:

Wait, now that you mentioned it, I bet somebody is already working on that one...

17 hours ago, Commander Zoom said:

Yeah, I know but it isn't stock, though. That means @SQUAD's Kerbals won't join the Federation, while everybody's Kerbals who already developed that drive might join sooner or later...

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On 08/09/2017 at 6:03 PM, SQUAD said:

 

specifically German, French, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Nice :) I don't need it for myself, but it means I can advertise the game to more people I know

And, honestly, I think some terms are better left in English... I mean, "stage" as a verb? Seriously?

Edited by monstah
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