Info from the 1.1 Beta Testers

[bewing]

I've tried to create a summary of helpful hints, tips, do's and don'ts, etc -- from what the beta-testers have seen.
@Any beta-testers: please chime in with anything I've missed!

Kraken:
We tried to summon as many of the old kraken as we could, but they didn't come.
The Hell Kraken seems to be gone.
The Waterboarding Kraken is either gone or very very rare. (On a floating craft, eva/board/eva/board until your ship explodes.)
The Klaw Kraken cannot be summoned anymore, because only the klaws on the focused craft are active now.
We never saw any cases of ship parts colliding with the VAB or launchpad from a distance that we recall.
There are some new kraken associated with wheels and landing legs, but those are being worked on.

Things you will probably like (but may not notice immediately):
Pinnable context menus for the parts. Just awesome!
The new orbit lines. They fade, either ahead of your ship or behind, to give a sense of direction. The fading is customizable on the main settings screen.
Limiting RCS to only being used for translation.
Cutaway cockpit views: Click the little circular button next to the kerbonaut portraits to activate it.
The new MK2 inline cockpit.
The Wheesley engine now has 50% more beef -- try flying level, full thrust, at 5Km altitude and see what happens.
Reaction wheels can be toggled or partially disabled -- very nice for rovers.
Suspension disabling is coming soon for all legs and wheels, but it doesn't quite work yet.
There is some evidence that MK1 parts have had their drag coefficients reduced a lot. This makes your jets fly faster.
After gathering experimental data, you can close the doors on the ScienceJr to make it more heat resistant.
Landing lights and brake lights on most of the wheels.
Pressing / cancels timewarp from any level in one stroke.
Try right-clicking the Pe or Ap markers.
RCS and SAS indicator lights on the navball are now clickable buttons.
Intersect points in orbit now show the relative speed.
Forward facing control surfaces now work, by setting their "authority" to -100.
Jets are more stable in flight now.
Placing jet engines and air intakes now works better.

Amusing things you may see:
On very very rare occasions, when you try to EVA a kerbonaut, you can spawn an unlimited number of ghosts instead.

Things to be careful of:
Clipping parts into each other in 1.1 can easily make your craft non-functional. If your craft isn't working, check this first!
The LY05 landing gear must now be mounted vertically to the ground. Not at a backwards tilt. Otherwise it will clip into the ground and not move well.
It's harder to get klaws to grab now. Come in more carefully, and try to hit the centerline of your target.
With some graphics settings, you may get a big framerate performance hit when looking at a planet or the ocean. Tweaking your settings can help a lot.
You need to activate radiator panels now.
There is some evidence that MK1 parts have had their drag coefficients reduced a lot. This might make your re-entry vehicle come in much faster than expected and heatsplode or crash at 300 m/s. Use drogues! Or think outside the box.
Be careful of using the "jettison" button on the inflatable heat shield. It has been very dangerous. Try using a rockomax decoupler instead.
"Explosive decoupling" is much harder to get to work now.
The runway and launchpad are fragile -- on an impact they may blow up, take your ship with them, and need repairing.
The low-tech landing gear need delicate handling -- be careful landing and going over bumps (slowly!).
Beware of multidocking currently -- because of the docking port issue (below).
Struts and fuel lines may cause unreasonable amounts of drag currently.
Nose fairings are not hollow, so be careful what you put in them.
In general, joints are stiffer ... but some joints move more. You may need a few more struts.

Visual Notes:
There are some funny shader glitches, & etc. They are in the bugtracker, and will hopefully be dealt with sometime.
Fuzzy text (being dealt with).
Landing legs and wheels visually always clip into the ground now. They are only fully visible when the suspensions are fully compressed. This is intended.

Issues you may see:
Flags from 1.0.5 savegames always fall over, and are not exactly at the location where you placed them.
Landing Leg sliding: your landed ship may slide downhill until it gets to level ground (or we have seen them slide uphill! -- but maybe that has been fixed.).
The jitterbug dance: some wheels on some vehicles may have a "positive feedback loop" that makes them bounce. A lot. And maybe even destroy themselves. Or parts of your craft. Or even flip your craft. It's being worked on.
Docking ports: they have been falling off sometimes.
The axis of rotation of the landing legs is wonky in the editors.
The old toggle motor and toggle steering action groups are temporarily missing for the wheels.
You may see some random crashing. This is hard to debug and fix, but it's been reported to the bugtracker.

Notes for the future:
We have let the devs know that many users find the new navball to be too large and annoying -- takes up too much room in the center of your screen. They will do something about it soon.

 

BTW: the beta testers filed over 1500 bug reports during the 1.1 pre-release. Most of them are minor, but it is also true that less than half of them have been addressed yet. So if you find an issue that I didn't mention -- it is highly likely that it's already been reported in the bugtracker. So please do a quick search the bugtracker before filing a new report.

Edited April 21, 2016 by bewing

[smjjames]

Re Hell Kraken: I've only tried to test for the one that happens when a kerbal collides with the ground. The one that happens when you least expect it when you go to a ship in the tracking station (usually en-route to Jool or Eeloo) may still be out there.

Other amusing things: When changing camera modes in EVA (I think this is new?), when you switch to orbital view mode, the Kerbal flops over. Mostly harmless, but be careful.

Notes for the future: We have also let them know about the text size and readability issues, from day one of the pre-releases, they should take care of this... at some point..... ( @bewing feel free to reword it)

 

[N_Molson]

Thanks a lot for those notes, very interesting.

In addition, I have the feeling (is it just me ? - I play music and train my hear a lot -) that the audio quality is much lower than in previous versions. It's like the files have been compressed to a higher rate. Is it intentional ? I can definitively hear a lot of "compression noise" in background of all audio FX and some music tracks, that's a pity.

[bewing]

Yes, some people have mentioned audio quality on the bugtracker. For some reason, I've never had music on my KSP that I recall?

But no, it's definitely not just you. http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/7856

[Alshain]

I like the Navball with that size.  I used to use EnhancedNavball to increase it, now I don't have to.  But I still have to move it off to the left with EnhancedNavball, because front and center is annoying.

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Is there a way to disable the popups when mousing over buildings at KSC?

[N_Molson]

Just now, Alshain said:

I like the Navball with that size.  I used to use EnhancedNavball to increase it, now I don't have to.  But I still have to move it off to the left with EnhancedNavball, because front and center is annoying.

That would be cool to be able to size it down independently from the rest of the UI. The most annoying issue, is that on a 1050x1680 screen, the original texture size is too small, and looks almost a bit blurry.

[Alshain]

2 minutes ago, N_Molson said:

That would be cool to be able to size it down independently from the rest of the UI. The most annoying issue, is that on a 1050x1680 screen, the original texture size is too small, and looks almost a bit blurry.

I can see how that would be a problem, I use 1920x1080, I also used to use TextureReplacer to put a much better texture on it.

 

Edited April 19, 2016 by Alshain

[smjjames]

Hopefully there is some kind of mod that fixes the text issues.... Which aren't horrible, but they do lower the overall quality.

nvm, misunderstanding on the QA proccess and stuff.

Edited April 20, 2016 by smjjames

[bewing]

3 minutes ago, Waxing_Kibbous said:

Is there a way to disable the popups when mousing over buildings at KSC?

No, but I did see one beta tester make that suggestion. I'm not sure if any devs noticed, though.

4 minutes ago, N_Molson said:

That would be cool to be able to size it down independently from the rest of the UI. The most annoying issue, is that on a 1050x1680 screen, the original texture size is too small, and looks almost a bit blurry.

Yes, that suggestion was made repeatedly. Or making the basic navball draggable, ala Enhanced Navball.

[Alshain]

1 minute ago, smjjames said:

Hopefully there is some kind of mod that fixes the text issues.... Which aren't horrible, but they do lower the overall quality.

Speaking of quality, aren't the text issues something QA should have caught?

You can raise the UI size in settings and then use MakeItSmall to lower the non-text stuff.  I don't understand why Squad can't give us the ability to resize individual elements of the UI.  Seems like a no-brainer.

[N_Molson]

I'm pretty sure they ran out of time to get a lot of things "polished". I'm very confident all those small things are going to be fixed soon. There are a lot of improvements on 1.1 that work perfectly. Nice work Squad & the Beta Testing Team ! 

[bewing]

3 minutes ago, N_Molson said:

I'm pretty sure they ran out of time to get a lot of things "polished". I'm very confident all those small things are going to be fixed soon.

Yes, that's exactly it. Maybe it'll be a month until a patch comes along to make everything pretty. But I feel that the game is playable at this point, and there are definite advantages over 1.0.5.

[smjjames]

nvm, misunderstanding on the QA proccess and stuff.

Anyway, what's done is done and it's released, just need to continue moving forward.

Edited April 20, 2016 by smjjames

[smjjames]

You now, after seeing this thread:

 

Something occured to me, we should also try to point to mods that can help alleviate things like the UI scale, because theres going to be many bug reports on this.

[Guest]

Also, if you relied on SM2 shaders for performance in LKO or Duna orbit, you'll have to enable that in the settings file, set LEGACY_UNSUPPORTED_TERRAIN_SHADERS to "True".  There is no setting within the game now.

Edited April 20, 2016 by regex

[bewing]

3 minutes ago, smjjames said:

Something occured to me, we should also try to point to mods that can help alleviate things like the UI scale, because theres going to be many bug reports on this.

Go for it. I agree, but I know nothing about mods.  Make a post that's all about the nice 1.1 updated mods.

Edited April 20, 2016 by bewing

[LameLefty]

Nice collection of observations, @bewing - that does seem to cover what most have found these past couple weeks. I will add that for me, personally, most of those bugs haven't been serious show-stoppers, even with me trying to break stuff by opening up my well-under-way 1.05 Career save with an early 1.1 beta build. 

[sgt_flyer]

nice list @bewing

i'd like to add a few things -

Rover wheels / landing gear action groups : the old toggle motor and toggle steering action groups are currently missing for the wheels - Squad is working on it.

Docking ports falling off : this is even more true for multidocking currently - 3+ multidocking ports submitted to torque, and 1 of them will break very easily under torque.

so beware of multidocking currently

if i also remember, i've seen an issue talking about the extreme drag caused by struts and fuel lines - i don't know if it has been tweaked since, so beware

fairings :

only Interstage configurations are currently hollow - 'nose' payload fairings while closed are currently not hollow for performance purposes.

when fairings are discarded (interstage or payload) , they'll act normally in regards to physics. but don't decouple anything inside the payload fairings before ejecting them (or use nose 'payload' fairings as kerbal habitats) - they'll either get stuck in the geometry or be forcefully ejected from it.  hollow interstage fairings allow things to be decoupled within them on the other end

Edited April 20, 2016 by sgt_flyer

[Ultimate Steve]

1 hour ago, bewing said:

users find the new navball to be too large and annoying

This is the one issue with 1.1 for me. I cannot concentrate properly with that thing taking up half the screen. Other than that, 1.1 is amazing.

[N_Molson]

Landing a plane using the low-tech landing gears seems incredibly difficult to me. They seem extremely fragile. I tried with suspension on or off. Also the nose wheel steers the same angle regardless of the aircraft speed. That's a recipe for disasters. The basic runway is simply impossible to use, the aircraft simply bumps, turns and hops in a crazy dance of disintegration.

So I feel I'm missing something there. Has anyone experienced the same difficulties, and found a way around ? Also, I wonder if that "friction control" thing plays a role in that mess.

[A_name]

Quote

With some graphics settings, you may get a big framerate performance hit when looking at a planet or the ocean. Tweaking your settings can help a lot.

I'm having this! What settings should I tweak?

[basic.syntax]

5 minutes ago, A_name said:

I'm having this! What settings should I tweak?

nothing in-game; check out regex post a few lines above yours  

[A_name]

7 minutes ago, basic.syntax said:

nothing in-game; check out regex post a few lines above yours  

Thanks! If anyone else knows what other settings I could change, that would be much appreciated!

 

 

 

1 hour ago, regex said:

Also, if you relied on SM2 shaders for performance in LKO or Duna orbit, you'll have to enable that in the settings file, set LEGACY_UNSUPPORTED_TERRAIN_SHADERS to "True".  There is no setting within the game now.

Regex, could you give some more detail as to what this does, so I can decide whether it will help me?

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, A_name said:

Regex, could you give some more detail as to what this does, so I can decide whether it will help me?

It enables the legacy shader model 2 terrain shaders, should give much better performance on lower end graphics cards (like the Intel 4000 I'm stuck on) than the default SM3 terrain shaders when looking at the ocean from LKO or while in Duna orbit looking at Duna.  This was a huge performance boost back in 1.0.5; apparently the devs would prefer you spend more on hardware than on KSP merch...

Edited April 20, 2016 by regex