Ask Me A Few More Things

[Nate Simpson]

Good afternoon, Kerbonauts!

While last week's AMA was great, it looks like I forgot to check my staging when lining up the questions - many have pointed out that a lot of Discord queries got answered, but questions submitted through Steam and the Forums were neglected. I’ll try to be more conscious of that when the next AMA rolls around, but in an effort to right a past injustice, I’ll answer a few of the questions that got missed right now! Here we go:

Filip Hudak, on the forums:

"When we'll see other exotic fuel types like metallic hydrogen? Will they be added alongside some big update like colonies or will they be added before?"

We will be bringing in new engine and fuel types across multiple updates, generally as they become instrumental to the progression. I suspect nuclear pulse will be next up, as it opens up the interplanetary progression quite nicely and is a good supplement to colony building. Chris Adderley has also cooked up a few new methalox engines that I think will be popping up sooner rather than later.

Moons, on the forums:

Are there plans to give some sort of legacy UI? Are there plans to make the UI more modular for users to adjust it and change it with mods - especially a way to scale the UI? Are there plans to reduce the UIs use of screen space?

This is a good example of an area that’s being developed iteratively. I think the first goal is to give players the ability to rescale the flight HUD, but making it modular and giving both players and modders more control over how things look is a key priority for the UX/UI team.

walkingwiki666, on Steam:

"Will the games price increase as new features are added?"

The game’s price will certainly increase when 1.0 arrives, though if you purchased the game during Early Access, you’ll get all Early Access updates and the 1.0 update for free. After 1.0, we expect to continue providing free updates to the game, just like KSP1 did.

MARL_MK1, on the forums:

"It is cool that we can press 'F2' and take HUD-less screenshots, but given that it's the most basic way of taking screenshots, and that many of us players enjoy taking the best pictures possible of our crafts: Does KSP2 plan to implement a fully fleshed Camera Mode in which we can change settings such as Focal Lenght, DoF, Focus, Tilt, Filters and most of the other cool options that modern games nowadays implement in their Camera Modes?"

I need to do a better job of evangelizing our capture camera controls! If you hit V, you can cycle through camera modes. When you’re in Capture Mode, the numpad offers a bunch of new camera controls that you can combine to do smooth, swoopy pans, dollies, zooms, etc. You can combine these with paused time warp to do some pretty fancy stuff. Here are those controls:

• zoom in: keypad +
• zoom out: keypad -
• roll left: keypad 7
• roll right: keypad 9
• orbit up: keypad 8
• orbit down: keypad 5
• orbit left: keypad 4
• orbit right: keypad 6
• pan up: keypad 2 (or up arrow)
• pan down: keypad 0 (or down arrow)
• pan left: keypad 1 (or left arrow)
• pan right: keypad 3 (or right arrow)
• mouse toggle: backslash
• speed up camera movement: keypad *
• slow down camera movement: keypad /

alphaprior, on the forums:

"Will be possible to alter the surface on the planets? Like dig a pit or flatten an area for a colony?"

There are no current plans to do this - as you can imagine, it has some brain-bending multiplayer implications, especially when time warp gets involved. But it would be incredibly cool and I’m not aware of any specific technical blockers. It’s certainly come up in conversations with Mortoc, our senior graphics engineer. I mean, we have a game with nuclear pulse engines... the fact that you can’t make craters with them feels like a missed opportunity. So yeah, we’ll keep talking about this.

-----

Thanks for your questions!

On to business. We have knocked out a few more bugs for Patch Two, including that pesky issue where vehicles with more than 8 parts in a radial symmetry set were loading into the floor. We’ve just about wrapped up the cherry picking process and can say with confidence that it’ll be out sometime in the next two weeks. We’ll post an exact date for Patch Two as soon as we know it.

As we continue stabilizing and improving performance, we’re also making progress on re-entry heating, new parts, and Science Mode. And just to highlight that other, bigger systems are always being worked on in parallel, here’s some footage of our QA team goofing off in multiplayer:

Yes, collision is working:

Last week’s Duna-focused Weekly Challenge yielded some incredible creations! If you’re in the mood to see highlights, the most-upvoted posts on both the ksp2_challenges and ksp2_screenshots Discords are now archived in the ksp2_bestof channel. There, you’ll see stuff like this:

Those hydrogen tanks shine up real nice!

Finally, an apology: we’ve had some minor technical difficulties getting the next Weekly Challenge put together, but we hope to be able to get something posted over the weekend. We regret the delay.

See you next week!

[Tazooka]

Hopefully patch 2 soon

[The Space Peacock]

The AMA was awesome, and its great you took some time to go over a few of the forum questions aswell here  i’m excited to hear new parts are being worked on, especially more methalox engines! As for the weekly challenges; has anything been decided yet on making the ‘mission patches’ into something more concrete that players can earn by completing the challenge?

[Little 908]

I thought you said multiplayer was the least prioritized thing, yet you have it working already? or at least the bare bones

Edited March 31, 2023 by Little 908

[LezRowl]

8 minutes ago, Little 908 said:

I thought you said multiplayer was the least prioritized thing, yet you have it working already? or at least the bare bones

Everything in the game has to work well with each other. So multiplayer has to be built in from the start, otherwise it will be much harder to integrate other features of the game with multiplayer. Multiplayer would be considered a core feature of the game, so that also makes sense that it is being worked on from day one.

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, Little 908 said:

I thought you said multiplayer was the least prioritized thing, yet you have it working already? or at least the bare bones

Multiplayer has to be designed in from the start, if you try to add it last thing you’re in for a world of pain.

It also makes sense to polish and package it last because everything else will affect it, and if you need to make sure it keeps working at near production quality as you add features it’ll slow you down a lot. 

If they didn’t have functional if rough MP now I would be very worried about ever having it!

[BanzaiHeil]

I wish I had thought to copy my question before submitting on discord so that I could just paste it to re-ask for future AMAs, since it looks like it won't be getting acknowledged this time around.  I put a lot of thought into that multiple paragraph question.

[Strawberry]

Also KSP2 has engineers whose specialty is to work on multiplayer so itd be a waste to put them towards other projects such as bug fixing as that isnt there specialty 

[Ace27]

Thanks for the screenshot of the barebones multiplayer test session. Gives us something to be excited about! Looking forward to Patch #2, hopefully we get an update on the timing of that patch soon?

[alphaprior]

Please keep talking about planet surface pits, craters and such!
As for multiplayer and time warp, maybe an isolation or a pause for game elements that could be disrupted?

[Filip Hudak]

Thank you for answering one of my questions. I didn't expect that it would be answered among more than 1000 other questions from other people .   I'm looking forward to the nuclear pulse drive. I'm interested if the acceleration is continuous or not.

[Strawberry]

So glad you guys fixed the VAB bug that one was painful

[The Aziz]

43 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

Here are those controls:

• zoom in: keypad +
• zoom out: keypad -
• roll left: keypad 7
• roll right: keypad 9
• orbit up: keypad 8
• orbit down: keypad 5
• orbit left: keypad 4
• orbit right: keypad 6
• pan up: keypad 2 (or up arrow)
• pan down: keypad 0 (or down arrow)
• pan left: keypad 1 (or left arrow)
• pan right: keypad 3 (or right arrow)
• mouse toggle: backslash
• speed up camera movement: keypad *
• slow down camera movement: keypad /

Yeah speaking of those... I'd very much like to see more keybinds editable. I'm one of the few who's ever confused by default RCS keybinds and i like to have them exactly on the numpad. ...not only it doesn't save for whatever reason, so despite having it set up I still have to use HJKLwhatever, but also it looks like some of the camera movements are locked to the numpad as well.

[LoSBoL]

41 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

This is a good example of an area that’s being developed iteratively. I think the first goal is to give players the ability to rescale the flight HUD, but making it modular and giving both players and modders more control over how things look is a key priority for the UX/UI team.

Great! 

46 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

I need to do a better job of evangelizing our capture camera controls! If you hit V, you can cycle through camera modes. When you’re in Capture Mode, the numpad offers a bunch of new camera controls that you can combine to do smooth, swoopy pans, dollies, zooms, etc. You can combine these with paused time warp to do some pretty fancy stuff. Here are those controls:

It could use a POV control as well, next to native monitor resolution support for other than 16:9 screens. 

[skylifeplays]

56 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

I suspect nuclear pulse will be next up, as it opens up the interplanetary progression quite nicely and is a good supplement to colony building.

I wonder how the bombs would work. After all, nuclear bombs are not liquid. I could imagine you would have something like a rack with like 10 or 100 bombs that could be attached to metal frames or in a cylindrical form.

[HammerTyme]

The Capture camera controls blew my mind.  Have these been in the game since launch?!   This is amazing. But it makes me wonder what other controls im not aware of. I never played KSP1 so Im new to all of this. (Or at least I was at first) I have about 100 hours in the game now already.   My personal feedback would be to have the control settings updated with all the current key bindings in the game. 

[Dakota]

33 minutes ago, BanzaiHeil said:

I wish I had thought to copy my question before submitting on discord so that I could just paste it to re-ask for future AMAs, since it looks like it won't be getting acknowledged this time around.  I put a lot of thought into that multiple paragraph question.

DM me on your Discord account and I'll go grab it from the backend.

[HammerTyme]

9 minutes ago, LoSBoL said:

Great! 

It could use a POV control as well, next to native monitor resolution support for other than 16:9 screens. 

21:9 is supported. That’s what I’m playing on. 3440x1440p 

[Hlivno]

Will Kerbal Space Program 2 be in the Steam Summer Sale? 

[AtomicTech]

1 hour ago, Nate Simpson said:

Yes, collision is working:

Probably Matt Lowne and Scott Manley there in the background

[Guest]

Nice. Thanks for the extra information. It's also cool to see how much infrastructure is already in place for future features.

[LameLefty]

I am really hoping this is fixed and just didn't get a mention in what to expect for Patch 2.

 

[Blocksmith]

  Voxel the planet!

[RealSagg]

How would you manage a Colony?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

 

Will HOTAS support for spaceplane flight be introduced during any part of the EA? 

 

With the CBT system revamp - will the towering mountain spires near KSP 's KSC be reintroduced?  (They were fun to fly around!) 

Mortoc's Dev Diary 18 was very interesting.  Any chance we can get a second installment where he goes into more detail about the CBT system and what it's like to port the existing work over to that? 

• We'd love to see some updates on the HDRP portion as well!