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KSP Weekly: Godspeed, John Glenn


SQUAD

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1 hour ago, Pixel Kola said:

yaaaawwwwnn....

 

7 months of amateur development... still nothing. lol

Bring in a high school CS class maybe? Or would they be above this team's pay-grade?

 

I'm not sure what you expect, really. KSP development has never been rapid, not at least in the 4-5 years I've been watching it. I wouldn't exactly call it slow, but I think calling it steady would not be unreasonable. Until recently, it's pretty much been a small team of people who were relatively inexperienced in developing videogames working for a company that had never made a videogame with owners who didn't really know much about videogames at all. It hasn't been 7 months of "amateur" development... it's been 5 years of it. I don't say that as an insult because it's essentially true (few team members, if any until recently, had professional videogame dev experience prior to working on KSP) and because KSP is the impressive result of hard work done by a small team of very talented "amateurs."

If you ever expected fast development with tons of new features given those circumstances, you are an incredibly optimistic person. After pretty much the entire dev team -- all of the veterans who knew the code -- left last year and new people joined the team, it was going to take a significant amount of time to regain momentum. Reading millions of lines of code written by a dozen different people and making sense of them is not a quick process. It might not be flashy new features, but having the new team focus on localization probably gave them the time and experience they needed with the code to be able to move on to more interesting things.

By the way, this isn't some grand defense of Squad and their decisions; it is what happened with some rational thinking applied to try to understand the situation.

This small, new team is supposedly bigger than ever, and even has some outside development and QA help, but now they're working on fixing two broken console versions, updating three PC versions to an updated engine, and creating their first game expansion. Even if the veteran team members never left they'd need more resources than they have now to approach what I'd consider rapid development.

Since KSP is not set up to be a game as a service, and since there are no microtransactions, I don't think Take-Two will change anything at this time. I expect this small team to continue at the same pace as always until the expansion is released. After that, well, who knows. We've never really been informed about the future of KSP, so it's anyone's guess.

Of course you're free to expect whatever you want and say what you want, but that can't change how things are in this case. I prefer when what I expect is what happens, and when I can't control what happens I control my expectations. Sometimes my expectations are exceeded and I'm pleasantly surprised. And when it comes to KSP, well, it's far from perfect, but I've been pleasantly surprised.

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Last week we mentioned that we were working on new textures and configuration for the fairings, remember? Well, as we were doing that, we noticed a problem that has been in the game since the first fairings were introduced, and has probably been a headache for modders who have been trying to set personalized textures to their fairings. One of the developers was able to identify and fix that problem as he was working with the artists on these parts. Basically, the UV mapping that the fairings had, wasn’t displayed in an homogeneous way and so, it distorted the textures projected onto the models. Click here to see an example. That image represents how the UV Mapping was display onto the fairings. The UV horizontal axis had a miscalculation, resulting in some very noticeable issues when using a checkerboard pattern. The vertical axis, in the other hand, was based on the height of the model instead of taking the distance between each vertex in the model into account, as well. As a result, the UV cubes were stretched and deformed if the fairings were set with irregular shapes. Once the issue was detected, it was easily fixed. You can see the current representation through the checkerboard pattern of the UV Mapping for the fairings here. Big difference, right?

And that’s not all, we also implemented Bump Map support for the fairings too, which basically creates the illusion of depth on the surface of the model using a very simple lighting trick. This way, no additional resolution is added to the model and we get a cool depth look for the new fairing textures. The team also added a separate UV Map for the fairing caps, so now, we’ll be able to set individual textures for those caps. Cool, right?

 

Now if we can get firespitter to swap the fairing textures and the devs soften the curves a bit we should have some damn fine fairings.

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9 hours ago, Mako said:

Of course you're free to expect whatever you want and say what you want, but that can't change how things are in this case. I prefer when what I expect is what happens, and when I can't control what happens I control my expectations. Sometimes my expectations are exceeded and I'm pleasantly surprised. And when it comes to KSP, well, it's far from perfect, but I've been pleasantly surprised.

Agreed...they're a small indie developer without a recurring revenue model and I've set my expectations to that level. I'm really excited at the pace of development. I was certainly hoping they do an art/balance pass over existing parts sometime.

Frankly, if the update cycle were any faster it would be a major headache for modders.

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On 27/10/2017 at 9:21 PM, SQUAD said:

In other news, we noticed that some people were interested in knowing if we were going to implement the Shuriken Particle System into the game once we update to Unity 2017.1. We want to take advantage of the various improvements to that this engine upgrade allows, so the short answer is: Yes (It’s actually being worked on currently)!

Interesting.

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8 hours ago, Redneck said:

44 posts so far. I remember when there were page after page after page of forum posts during weekly. now only barely 2 pages. wow

I member.. Though I haven't been here in a while either - not like I used to fill page after page. And then there seems to be no more time to play KSP, due to work and life. :-/

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On 30/10/2017 at 5:10 PM, Redneck said:

44 posts so far. I remember when there were page after page after page of forum posts during weekly. now only barely 2 pages. wow

Well, I'm new here. I have the game since a month and I'm a member of this forum since yesterday. KSP is an old game, and it is about time it gets an expansion, else I don't see how they will be able to pay the devs.

I am an old user of PDX forums, and my experience is that there are less interest for expansions and new games around the middle of development, when DDs don't really show something really "interesting" (subjectively).  When we get closer to release, the advertisement really starts and more people get interested.

You seem to have a very good and active community, and there is at least one new buyer for this expansion (me, since I think I will continue to care for this game past the initial interest), so all is not lost!

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Will the new Unity introduce better wheel physics as well? Or at least open up room for potential bug fixes?

I just dropped the coolest rover on Eve in the last KSP challenge... but I cheated it into orbit to start the challenge, so everything was copacetic.
I took it on a legit mission to Duna and the wheels (and even the command seats) went kraken on me, appearing at odd, apparently random angles.

A memory like that one encourages me to not give a deltaV about mission legitimacy... or continuing to play [insert rage-quit here] .

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On 11/2/2017 at 2:46 AM, Dark Lion said:

Will the new Unity introduce better wheel physics as well? Or at least open up room for potential bug fixes?

Well Shadowmage and lo-fi have made KSPWheel, an entirely new wheel collider, and I daresay it's a sight more stable than stock. So it's not Unity that's holding SQUAD back; it's their unwillingness to invest months of research and development to create an in-house collider. Which I can understand; they're a company and they have priorities, and at least at the moment, wheels aren't at the top of the list. But it'd be nice to have the improvements of a collider like KSPWheel in stock. SQUAD may even have access to certain low-level information that would improve the functionality even of KSPWheel considerably.

Edited by 0111narwhalz
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I too am still playing on 1.2.2 ( when are actually find the time to play these days) My career in 1.2.2 is too far along for me to restart yet again just for a few bug fixes which don't seem to be affecting me. I'm very happy to hear that there will be a an update to the Unity engine again. Performance improvements are the most important thing for this game.

 

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