So... what's happening?

[Frostiken]

I wasn't keeping up-to-date with KSP for the last few months... and this puts me in an annoying position of having to ask annoying questions. I don't know if Forumocalypse wiped out the dev journals as well, but all we have is information on some flags and mention of a scene loader (which... whatever that is). I don't know if I missed a lot, but I do sort of miss the more detailed, consolidated older way of relaying information (and the devs were more active on the forum too). I've heard rumors of a new memory management part loader so I can stop crashing every hour... any truth to this rumor? Might it be in 0.20? What other information do we have?

I'll be honest I only really care about the part loader because right now I'm crashing like a teenage pop star because I'm too stubborn to clean out my parts folder, but figuring out what I missed would also be nice.

[eatorsp]

From C7's devblog

As for the scene loading system. While at GDC I spoke to the engineers over at Unity, and described the issues we've been having with memory crashes. Apparently during the loading of a scene, the new scene, and the old scene can be together in memory for a split second. We use some fairly large and memory intensive scenes, such as the flight scene and the tracking station. In those cases, even a partial load of another scene on top of the existing one can push your memory usage past the 32 bit "Wall". If that happens, the game will crash to desktop. It's unfortunately fairly common for computers with 2gb of ram, or ones that are running 32 bit operating systems. The new scene transition system will look ahead to the level being loaded. If the incoming level is the same as the old, the loader will keep the re-used textures and models in memory instead of wiping them. In the case of a scene to scene transition, like when going from flight to the tracking station, the loader will instead flush the memory completely and load the new level. This will clean up any memory and allows the garbage collector to do its job efficiently. On top of that, the new loader runs asynchronously in a co-routine, instead of attempting to do the level load in one frame. The benefit of this, is that Unity can continue to run its normal operations while the game loads.

We will also have some filtering options for Tracking Station as well