KSP 1.1 Marathon - Biggest Takeaways

[ShadowZone]

I apologize if there is already a thread about this (please be gentle, dear mods), but after watching many hours of the KSPTV experimentals marathon, I have a few takeaways I would like to share with you:

1. That performance boost! I can't even begin to tell you how much I look forward to that. If you know my body of work ( ahem ), then you know that I rarely do stuff with less than 300-500 parts. Having said that, I am aware that performance will vary from machine to machine.
2. All mods will need updates. The engine swap to Unity V is such a giant change of the game's core mechanics that you can't count on any mod still working. I have tried asking @KasperVldin the stream's chat whether or not some modders already have access to experimentals (except of course Squad semi-staff members like Roverdude), but either the answer or the question got lost in the torrent of chat messages.
3. The reworked UI is a thing of beauty. Not because it looks that much better. Because it greatly increases usability (I know a thing or two about that having written my empirical thesis on a self developed usability test), since you now can move context menus around and even make them sticky. Love this for my SSTO plane missions!
4. That inflatable heat shield is a beast. Mat (the first streamer) punched through Eve's atmosphere with that thing reaching more than 25g and both heat shield and payload survived. Immediately discussions about the shield being overpowered broke out. But keep in mind that thing is basically a big balloon and his payload was just a very tiny rover. Would love to hear @RoverDude's input on that since he designed the thing, if I remember correctly. Also don't know yet if that thing floats... thinking about swimming bases on Laythe...
5. There are still a few bugs, which is to be expected with experimentals.
   • Jimorian lost visuals for a moment and then had a second Kerbin hanging behind the regular Kerbin. It looked funny and weird.
   • Mat didn't have all of the orbit map visuals when trying to aim for Eve. He basically got there with sheer luck.
   • Rich to the Rescue encountered two bugs: Landing gear now slides down slopes (or maybe this is intentional? However it's really annoying)
   • After docking with multiple docking ports, some of Rich's ports suddenly disappeared. He wasn't sure if that was really a bug or if he did something wrong, but it looked like a bug to me.
6. Due to the change in game engine, a lot of visuals look different than the old version. Planet surfaces look less "tily" from above. There seems to be an issue though with Eve, since it almost looked fluorescent in Mat's part of the marathon stream. Really weird color.

So all in all it looks like KSP 1.1 will be a great update, although there appear to be some kinks still left in it. Let's just hope they will be ironed out in the coming weeks! Not sure about some long standing bugs like the "cannot activate while stowed" bug. Has anyone tried that out during the stream?

Anyhow: The hype is real

[qromodynmc]

1.1 is like core game, 1.2 will be real visual upgrade, porkjet will retexture all rocket parts and add pixel based rendering feature, hope they add some clouds and proper ocean.

[Just Jim]

I can't tell you how excited I am to see the performance increase!  I'm dying to try it out on my old win-7 computer.  If I can get even half the performance that video showed I'm going to be in KSP heaven!!!!

[Raptor9]

55 minutes ago, ShadowZone said:

Also don't know yet if that thing floats... thinking about swimming bases on Laythe...

Anyhow: The hype is real

This & This ^^^ 

[AlphaMensae]

I watched most of the streamers, and yes, the performance increase is real and amazing.  It is way more than I expected, great job Squad!

The one downside to the multithreading support is that there will be a short delay when decoupling large part count stages, as each detached stage becomes its own ship and gets a separate thread, and there is a pause as the game separates the threads.

Right now the airplane landing gear are extremely bouncy and just about indestructible.  I saw several large planes (including EJ's shuttle on a RTLS abort) come in real hot and they just went "boing boing boing" upon touching down without suffering any damage.  In one case it was the runway that suffered damage.  This could be a WIP issue, I sure hope this isn't intentional

The new rover wheels--oh my!  No more velcro tires, no more instant flip-out. Driving a rover (or car  ) will be fun now.

The new KSPedia looks real slick and will be a huge help for new players.  At last the game comes with the instruction manual it has long needed.

Two great editor changes I noticed: 

> When parts are separated, their icons now lie horizonatal under the engineer's report instead of being a vertial stack.  Now you can see the vessel's info when you have a large number of parts detached! 

> The parts list are now a single scrollable page instead of multiple pages.  No more need for Quckscroll.

> Ok, a third one:  I actually missed this one, but it was said that the UI is no longer click-through in the editor.  No more clicking on your ship when adjusting the staging?

Edited March 27, 2016 by Laguna

[Scotius]

Sounds good I'm already hyped - too bad it will take quite some time to get my hands on 1.1. Who woulda thunk buying the game from the SQUAD Store will be a downside, contrary to being a Steam purchaser?

[RoverDude]

With a reasonably large 2.5 or 3.75m payload, the inflatable heat shield ' s survivability gets a lot more sketchy, so I would not consider it op.

[Death Engineering]

I'm hoping that one minor bug from the 0.2x days is finally gone: 

Occasionally, usually after changing SOI or after launching, a maneuver node cannot be placed. This is an old, old, OLD bug and needs to be squashed.

(can you tell I just experienced it 2 mins ago and an "AYFKM!" moment?)

[Temeter]

18 minutes ago, RoverDude said:

With a reasonably large 2.5 or 3.75m payload, the inflatable heat shield ' s survivability gets a lot more sketchy, so I would not consider it op.

^What I expected. Ballistic coefficient gotta be ridiculous, tiny rover, giant heatshield, eve atmosphere.

Really hope that thing can do something for my interplanetary ships!

Btw, is it possible to retract the shield? Would open up a lot of cool gameplay.

Edited March 27, 2016 by Temeter

[ShadowZone]

what I would like to know: if that pesky "landing gear clips through launch pad" bug is now gone... that was really annoying trying to test landers.

[Aethon]

I was watching Jimorians' stream just now on twitch and it appears as though the resource scanning bug is still alive and kicking.  He scanned the Mun with the M700 and got a resource overlay, but then went to the tracking station to view the Mun from there and there was no resource data available.  The tracking station said that no resource scan had been done.

Ahhhhh!  This is one of the most frustrating bugs for me.  Unfortunately he didn't go back to the craft to see if there would still be data available to the scanner craft around Mun.  I hope this gets fixed before the public release.  Thank Kod for ScanSat!  It's unfortunate we have to rely on a mod to allow the use of a basic function that is essential to the stock game...

Please, please fix this Squad!

[Streetwind]

2 hours ago, Laguna said:

The one downside to the multithreading support is that there will be a short delay when decoupling large part count stages, as each detached stage becomes its own ship and gets a separate thread, and there is a pause as the game separates the threads.

If you're referring to EJ's vessels he used during Squadcast: that was actually a problem with the craft files - Kasper even said he was going to pass the craft files to the devs for troubleshooting.

I've seen some streamers stage vessels with similar part counts, and no freezes or stutters appeared beyond the usual minor slowdown that the game eperiences even now while staging. Jimorian mentioned a problem with craft files created with advanced editor tools/mods, so that may have been what made the game struggle with EJ's files as well. Though I admittedly don't know if he uses any.

1 hour ago, Death Engineering said:

I'm hoping that one minor bug from the 0.2x days is finally gone: 

Occasionally, usually after changing SOI or after launching, a maneuver node cannot be placed. This is an old, old, OLD bug and needs to be squashed.

(can you tell I just experienced it 2 mins ago and an "AYFKM!" moment?)

I... think I read something about that in a Devnote Tuesday at some point...? Though not sure if it was merely acknowledging the probem, or declaring it fixed.

[LordKael]

6 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

Jimorian mentioned a problem with craft files created with advanced editor tools/mods, so that may have been what made the game struggle with EJ's files as well. Though I admittedly don't know if he uses any.

Having watched this part of the stream, I can confirm that A) EJ does not use any mods, though he does use the Asteroid Day pack, and B) that depending on what sort of decoupling it was (launch clamps vs. SRBs or a first stage) the was varying amounts of lag, sometimes almost 10secs worth.  

[John FX]

Personally I can put up with some lag during staging if the upside of that is the increased performance for the other 99.99% of the time.

2 hours ago, RoverDude said:

With a reasonably large 2.5 or 3.75m payload, the inflatable heat shield ' s survivability gets a lot more sketchy, so I would not consider it op.

 

I`m just glad we will be able to aerobrake at Eve and Jool again with more than a 100m margin of error...

Edited March 27, 2016 by John FX

[Kerbal01]

3 hours ago, Laguna said:

I > When parts are separated, their icons now lie horizonatal under the engineer's report instead of being a vertial stack.  Now you can see the vessel's info when you have a large number of parts detached! 

 

This is my favorite part of this update, not going to lie  so many hours wasted rebuilding rockets I forgot to subassembly because I had to remove them to read the report.

[Temeter]

20 minutes ago, John FX said:

Personally I can put up with some lag during staging if the upside of that is the increased performance for the other 99.99% of the time.

 

I`m just glad we will be able to aerobrake at Eve and Jool again with more than a 100m margin of error...

I found recently out that 3.75m engines tend to be quite formidable heat shields for aerobreaking on jool.

Edited March 27, 2016 by Temeter