Nate Simpson

Good afternoon, fellow Kerbonauts! We continue to make good headway on performance improvements and bug squashing. In fact, we managed to sneak a few additional fixes into the first patch, including a fairly high-impact resource flow optimization. We also fixed the "Kraken drive" bug that created insane reverse thrust when an engine’s nozzle was obstructed - so if you’re working on a Kraken ship, the "unique" physics on which it depends are about to go away forever. We may not in fact have killed the Kraken yet, but we have definitely stubbed its tentacle. As to the timing of Patch One... QA is thoroughly testing the build right now, and as soon as they give us a thumbs-up, we’ll release it. Right now, our goal is to release that patch next Thursday (March 16th). Provided QA does not uncover any show-stopping bugs over the next few days, that date should hold. If they do run into something unexpected that needs to be fixed, that date will slip. We have done a fair amount of hand-wringing around whether we should announce the target date for this patch when there is a non-zero chance of a delay, but we know this topic is very important to you all, so we're doing our best to keep you all in the loop. We’ve also already completed a nice queue of fixes to go into the second patch, but we’ll talk more about that after we’ve got the first one out the door. To help tide you over until then, we’ve got a new performance-focused dev blog post from Mortoc, our senior graphics engineer. If you’ve been wondering how we test performance and what we’re doing to improve it, this one’s definitely worth a read. Finally, I just wanted to give a holler of support to the many people who have undertaken the weekly challenges - last week’s air-launched rocket challenge was a sight to behold, and we’re on the edges of our seats to see what mayhem will take place during this week’s Minmus challenge. If you want to take part (or just bask in the ingenuity and/or madness of our community), check out the Weekly Challenge Discord channel. Our Community Team has also picked out a few choice gems from the last week and added them to a Community Highlights post here. Yes, the shopping cart is in there. The shopping cart that flies. See you on Minmus!

Color game extremely strong here - reminiscent of the old Gulf Porsches. Great use of the new cargo parts, too!

These are gorgeous! I hope more people post their creations in this thread. Don't want to miss out on gems like this.

We chose that song exactly because it perfectly sums up both the experience of playing and making this game. I'm so happy that everybody understood our meaning!

Since I have asked similar questions about other games in the past, I have a lot of empathy for this perspective. Now I must do my penance by explaining what it looks like from the other side! I'm sure one of our producers could give you a more precise answer, but here's the general idea: every time we release an update, we essentially take a snapshot build of the game and then test it like crazy. That uses up a huge amount of QA bandwidth, and for a game like KSP2 it really is a non-trivial amount of work to test it in a way that approximates the range of activities that the entire community might get up to in the game. As they test that snapshot build, they sometimes discover bugs. Many of them (hopefully most of them) will be known bugs that are already tracked and that we're already working on. But some of these bugs might actually be new bugs that have emerged since the last update. Those point to unintended outcomes related to recent checkins -- i.e. by fixing one problem, we have created a new problem. We are trying very hard to hold ourselves to the standard of "the game should get better with every update," and that means that we take this sort of bug very seriously. This means that when such a bug arises, production and engineering go over these issues with a fine-tooth comb and figure out what broke, and then additional fixes are applied to the build until it's in a good state. Now, as you may have noticed, getting a candidate build to a level of quality that it's safe to release involves a lot of coordinated activity among a lot of people who also need to be advancing other areas of the game (for example bringing about perf improvements or working on roadmap features). Our update cadence is therefore carefully balanced against our need to keep pushing the entire game forward toward 1.0. Of course I would love to drop an update every day like the update Easter Bunny, but the reality is that each update comes with a cost, and we want to have the bandwidth to work on cool stuff like Colonies and Interstellar too. With that in mind, and because we want each update to contain lots of meaningful improvements, we can't release rapid-fire updates. HarvesteR was amazing and deserves his godlike status in this community, and I remember hanging on to his every post back when he was updating KSP. But I suspect that he was also constrained by similar production realities. All that said, I think it's safe to say that our key focus today is to correct issues that affect the quality of gameplay, which means performance bugs, bugs that stop some players from being able to play the game at all, bugs that result in loss of vehicle, bugs that result in mission failure, bugs that result in the game crashing, and bugs that ruin campaign saves. When such fixes are complete, we do not intend to sit on them for a long time. One of life's great frustrations is to read a complaint about a bug online and know that it's been fixed internally. As long as the wait between updates may feel on the outside, let me assure you that it feels even longer on the inside! Now @nestoris going to yell at me for speaking about this topic in a sloppy fashion, and I encourage him to join me in this thread if he'd like to add more to my explanation. I hope this at least gives you some sense of the environment within which our task assignments take place.

This is actually a great question! We have a very strong sense of which bugs affect the gameplay experience the most right now, and those issues have been assigned accordingly. Unfortunately, there is often a correlation between the profundity of a bug and the amount of time it takes to correct. This sometimes has the effect of "low importance" bugs seeming to get fixed on a faster timeline than "game breaking" bugs, and this is interpreted by some observers to mean that those bugs were more important to us. This is not the case. There are many people working on many bugs in parallel, and some of the systems involved are highly complex.

Point of clarity: this is not a list of "bugs we are aware of," this is a list detailing a subset of the issues that will be addressed in the first update. We have a very good sense of which of the current bugs are affecting gameplay quality the most, but in the interest of managing expectations we will not pre-announce any fixes until they have been tested and verified on our end. We appreciate the detailed and thorough reporting we've received from our community so far - that reporting is helping us to determine task priority and we are working hard on fixing those items. Since not all fixes require the same amount of effort, the order in which these items are completed does not necessarily reflect the order in which they are being assigned internally.

Those will pop up here.

What a week! First off, a huge thank you to all of the people who have decided to join us here at the beginning of Early Access. It’s been so exciting to see what you’ve done with KSP2’s new parts, and even though there have been some bumps in the road, it’s been so fun to explore the new Kerbolar System through your eyes. At the end of each day, our team has enjoyed camping out in the official Intercept Games Discord’s KSP2 screenshots channel and basking in the endless waves of creativity, innovation, and pure insanity. This community does not disappoint! Early Access has also yielded its first crop of bugs for us to fix, and we’re already making good headway. Our first Early Access update, which is planned to take place in the next couple of weeks, will contain the following fixes (as well as many other improvements that we’ll break down in more detail in our patch notes when the update goes out): Performance/Optimization Optimization: Main menu loading time reduced for min spec machines Optimization: runway light geometry simplified Optimization: engine exhaust CPU usage reduced Optimization: 50% reduction in main thread time spent on UI Flight/Physics Fixed: KSC and other objects follow vehicle to orbit Fixed: Engine plate floating node joints less rigid than other stack node joints (were not receiving multijoint reinforcement) Fixed: Planned trajectory enters runaway state when switching between flight view and map while engine is burning Fixed: Kerbals fall through ground when traversing ground near launchpad Fixed: Spotlight/headlight parts have dim bulbs and low effective range Fixed: Low-mass parts never stop moving on low gravity celestial bodies Fixed: RoveMax TR4 wheels sink into ground and spring craft upward when returned to focus Fixed: Loss of vehicle control when reverting to launch on runway Fixed: Physics impulse occurs when engine runs out of one fuel type, causing loss of vehicle Fixed: Game breaking when loading to VAB or loading a saved game with a vessel in flight Fixed: Animation stutters when EVA Kerbal is running Fixed: Large ladder disappears when base of ladder outside of camera view Environments Fixed: Ground decal applies to vehicles traversing margin of KSC grounds (removes Predator camo effect applied to rovers at edges of KSC) Fixed: Kerbin atmosphere and ocean vanish after returning to KSC from non-atmospheric celestial body Improved: Floating rocks/mesh scatter (floating reduced) Fixed: Kerbol lens flare still visible when observer is close to star Fixed: Improved collision for structures around KSC, including parking garage and fuel facilities Fixed: Clouds missing from celestial bodies when viewed from long distance Fixed: Atmosphere missing from Kerbin when viewed from the Mun’s SOI Fixed: Laythe atmosphere appears broken in map view User Interface Fixed: Camera middle-mouse movement axis does not switch to horizontal when in horizontal build mode Fixed: Launch Assembly tool breaks after repeated use in VAB Fixed: Debris not targetable Fixed: Time warp controls not accessible on KSC landing screen Fixed: Debris trajectory lines only appear after switching to flight and back to map Fixed: Some graphics settings adjust to “medium” after setting quality preset to “high” Fixed: Game crashes when returning to the main menu from VAB Fixed: Broken/empty Kerbal portraits in flight view Fixed: No orbit line after loading a saved game Fixed: Some difficulty settings don’t persist after ESC menu closure Fixed: No portrait representation in flight for probe cores We appreciate your patience as we continue to bring improvements to the game, and we thank you for your help in continuing to identify bugs and report them to us via our Customer Support page. In addition to the above bug fixes, you’ll notice a number of refinements, including increased vehicle part polish and an updated map interface. Ongoing performance improvements will also surface in this and future updates. We will provide a more detailed blog post soon to give you a better view into the ways that we’re assessing performance data, as well as what steps we’re taking to improve framerates on all platforms. Hang in there, we’re working very hard on this right now! Finally, if you have any questions about the game, please check out the FAQ, which our community team has been diligently updating to address today’s most frequently-encountered questions. *- Highly requested by the community

I'm just gonna camp out in this thread today.

The day is nearly here. This moment feels a little bit like dropping a kid off for the first day of school. We’ve got a lot of love for this game — we think we've prepared it for every eventuality, but we also know that it has more growing to do. We’re about to take the first steps on a journey that will eventually carry KSP2 through colonies, interstellar travel, and multiplayer. Now the real learning begins! What To Expect On day 1 of Early Access, players will be able to create and fly vehicles in Sandbox Mode and visit any location in the Kerbolar System. They’ll also have access to our first four interactive tutorials, accessible via the all-new Training Center. These teach basic rocketry concepts to give new players a head-start on their space programs. You’ll encounter new parts, including new procedural wings, new wheels, new command pods, new cargo parts, and new engines (and the first of the new fuels – liquid hydrogen). To pave the way for the upcoming interstellar-class parts, we’ve also added a new, larger core size. As we progress through Early Access, we’ll continue to expand on all of these features. We can’t wait to finally see what creative feats the community can achieve with the new procedural and color-customizable parts. Our environment team is eager to watch players explore the revamped terrains of the Kerbolar System (and are curious if they'll discover anything unexpected). The UX/UI team is keen to learn how the updated user experience feels - they've put a lot of effort into wrangling a very complex set of requirements into a new, more streamlined presentation. This is it — the moment has arrived when all our plans come into contact with reality! There are many new features, big and small, for you to explore on day 1. We've put together this guide to give you an overview of what's new and to break down some known issues. Release day notes and future patch notes will also live here. In the launcher you'll find reporting tools that you can use to tell us about any problems you've encountered, as well as to give us feedback about any other aspect of the player experience you think we should know about. This feedback will be invaluable to us as we continue to improve the game's stability, performance, and playability. What Comes Next Many new features will arrive as we continue development, including Science Mode, Colonies, Interstellar exploration, and Multiplayer. Take a look at our Early Access Roadmap for more details. In the meantime, we're bringing back Weekly Challenges! We intend to mix things up a little bit going forward, but the first challenge will be a classic Achievement Challenge: Primary goal: Fly to the Mun and get a picture of a Kerbal in front of the most interesting feature you can find Stretch goal: strand a Kerbal there and pick them up with a second vehicle, returning them safely to Kerbin Jeb-level goal: do any of the above on any other celestial body in the Kerbolar System Val-level goal: pronounce "Mun" correctly If you want us to see (and maybe share) your achievement, use #KSP2WeeklyChallenge on social media, or share them in our official Discord. Welcome to KSP2! The journey begins!

A link to this post went up on our internal slack channel at Intercept yesterday and we all loved it. We are inspired and energized by stories like this - it's the main reason most of us (including me) joined this team to begin with. I hope you keep posting updates as your career progresses so we can watch your transition from Kerbal rockets to real ones! Also, some incredible builds in that video. That mass driver at your Mun base was rad. Thanks for sharing, Entropian!

A couple of clarifications: Methalox was chosen as our default fuel to serve the colony progression: ISRU is a major component of the midgame, and we felt that methalox was the best all-purpose fuel to speak to the harvesting->fuel creation pipeline (if you look at the details of our colony methane fuel factory, it's got Sabatier reactors, water electrolyzers, CO2 condensors, etc.). We're hoping, as usual, that if a person is interested in the process being demonstrated, they can hit Wikipedia and learn some cool stuff. Second, we haven't talked much about it, but +1 to the folks above who have pointed out that there will be another new fuel present for day one of Early Access: liquid hydrogen. When you see gold foil on tanks in any capture footage, that's what that is. The NERV and SWERV engines run on hydrogen.

This is a great thread. Just wanted to add the tidbit that the overly-crowded navball is something I was experimenting with in my free time, and it has already been significantly de-cluttered since this capture was collected (I went back to 45 degree increments and it immediately got much easier to parse). The atmosphere indicator was also already being revised to make clearer exactly where the indicator is pointing (and it's quite validating to see that need called out here). I hope you all will keep the feedback coming as these changes go in!

The roadmap is chronological. Colonies share a lot of fundamental systems with existing features (VAB, modular construction), while the resource loop involves a significant amount of special work around resource detection (and representation), extraction, processing... and all of those functions are associated with new parts that require new part modules. Given that large portions of the interstellar progression are functionally impossible to reach without on-orbit vehicle construction, and considering that resource collection WITHOUT colonies to process them would have low utility, we determined that colonies before resources was the way to go.

I'm pretty stoked about the solution we found, yeah. You'll see...

Our tech artist checked in a fix for that literally two hours after we did the capture. The perils of posting footage of a game in development!

You'd be amazed how longer runway = heavier planes = "I wish it were even longer."

We definitely recognize that axial tilt introduces additional navigational challenges and we're designing the planet progression with that in mind. I think it would be pretty presumptuous of us to tilt Kerbin, as cool as it would be to make it more like Earth... for reasons stated above, we'd like people to learn to walk before they run. There will be PLENTY of opportunities to interact with aggressively-tilted planets as you explore further

They are extremely cool. Our team is still trying to wrap our heads around all the new design possibilities that come with procedural wings - last week we all spent time building racecars... and they're just fantastic. It's one aspect of the game that I'm very excited to see in the hands of players.

Unless a part is explicitly clad in a nonstandard material, we are designing all part materials with part-to-part consistency in mind. Because our team color application allows not only hue but opacity control, it is possible for players to modulate some aspects of the part's material read as well, if for some reason they want a non-uniform result.

Hi everyone – this is Nate Simpson, Creative Director for Kerbal Space Program 2. We have made the difficult decision to move the release date of KSP 2, which will now launch in early 2023 on PC with our console release later that year. We are building a game of tremendous technological complexity, and are taking this additional time to ensure we hit the quality and level of polish it deserves. We remain focused on making sure KSP2 performs well on a variety of hardware, has amazing graphics, and is rich with content. We’ve built a spectacular team at Intercept Games – a team that includes, as previously mentioned, key members from the development team behind the original Kerbal Space Program. We have the perfect combination of experienced, passionate, and skilled developers to fully realize this game’s ambitious potential. We are forever grateful to the KSP community for sticking with us on this journey, and we appreciate your continued support as we push towards the finish line. We can’t wait for everyone to play the game, and we’ll keep sharing more information with you in the coming months.

I thought we weren't going public with the ball of pitch until later. Did I miss this meeting?

Seeing this question pop up in a few places. We don't currently have specific plans to add procedural solar panels for release, as solar gameplay wasn't blocked by the absence of a large-scale solution in the way that radiator gameplay was. As you get deeper into the progression, you've got a number of other power generation solutions that don't rely on sunlight (since many of the problems you're solving involve either being very far from a star or being in a situation in which solar intermittency is an obstacle). I'd love to hear the applications you see for big, interestingly-shaped solar panels. That's our new VAB music, courtesy of Howard Mostrom. It makes you 28 percent more creative.

Yep, those are snippets from Howard's score for the game. He's doing a great job - we're all really proud of him! Little known fact: he's also a saxophone prodigy! And he's really kind and is probably some kind of angel or something.