Newest Squadcast: Highlights, lots of new info about .24

[Shuttle]

I've watched the latest Squadcast from the beginning till the end, some people asked for highlights, so here goes:

Don't forget my English is pretty bad so I could understand something wrong

Link to Squadcast: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/254-Squadcast

1:28 Problem with the NASA thing is that it kinda started eating everything else.

2:55 Hello, Harvester!

3:45 Harv about contracts

Contracts are not scripted, event-driven missions!

Think about contracts as quests, freely given objectives, you can accept or ignore them.

There will be a penalty for a failure.

Missions don't end and don't repeat themselves because they are dynamically generated based on different templates.

For example, contract for a test flight. Contractors are both well known like Rockomax and completely new.

Contractors will offer player things that they want him to do. If it is a manufacturer, they might want you to test their part in particular situation. It might be easy (test SAS on the launch pad) and hard (test SAS on Eelo). This is just one of the templates.

The system will be improved in the future, this is just first step.

08:30 New mission control screen

Will have a frame much similar to the Science Archives. You'll have Gene Kerman ready to give an opinion about what you are doing.

9:40 Wobbling

One tweak in the latest Unity turned out to be a gamechanger for developers.

Devs are not getting rid of wobble entirely, they want to have control over it, to give players wobble that makes sense.

Devs are trying to have as much control as they can so they can have wobbly connections where they should be wobbly and sturdier connections where they shouldn't be.

12:55 "Hopefully, we can also alleviate the need to spam using strut connectors everywhere"

14:10 Multiplayer

It is going to take a while. Jesus is working hard on server side. Nothing worth showing at this point. Currently working on the server backend structure.

16:30 Tutorials

Working hard on them right now, a lot of good progress . Marco works on tutorials, not Harv. Mun tutorials completely redone. New science tutorial, advanced construction tutorial incoming.

Devs don't want to take player by hand and walk him through the entire game. They don't want tutorials to take away the sense of accomplishment, finally understanding how to do something.

19:45 NASA pack

Working with NASA on separate add-on pack

You can consider it as an official mod

It will be released separately from .24 and will require .24

Two separate releases (as far as I understand, Harv meant .24 and NASA pack): NASA pack will come afterwards because it requires many core modifications

Chad's working on new content for the pack that will include a lot of replicas of actual NASA parts (including SLS)

SLS is massive, devs are creating a new size of parts for this; it will make Jumbo look like a little tank.

Such a big parts are only possible because of new joint system, new joints are a lot more stable

25:45 Asteroids

Harv has been working on a system that will generate asteroids

31:00

Don't expect asteroids to be large

32:30

Small tweaks

36:30

Harv goes away

37:31 - QA, worth watching

Giant parts - part of the asteroid mode (?) or part of the stock? Stock.

One new big fuel tank with engine makes up for 6 Jumbos+6 Rockomax engines. Maxmaps doesn't know the exact diametr.

39:40 ASTEROIDS NOT ON RAILS!

~39:42

asteroids spawning all over the place at random areas\orbits, some will get captured by Kerbin, some will impact Kerbin. Asteroids will be able to crash into your spacestation

Gravity on asteroids - no, because asteroids are tiny, 10-30 meters large. But devs control the size

How many asteroids? Quite a few

Capture an asteroid with shuttle cargo bay? I forgot the exact answer, but AFAIR yes, if it is not too big.

Edited February 9, 2014 by vexx32
fixed some spelling errors for you; hope you don't mind that I fiddled with the formatting to make things clearer

[GusTurbo]

Did it sound like we will be able to use the large diameter parts in the stock KSP too?

[LameLefty]

I missed the Squadcast last night so thank you for the summary!

[Xetalim]

This is quite a nice summary, I like it!

[Shuttle]

Did it sound like we will be able to use the large diameter parts in the stock KSP too?

That question was asked at 37:25

"...to consider the most of everything in the asteroid mode as a stock"

[pss88]

Will be there money in 0.24? Or only random missions and if you complete it you'll get nothing?

[Comrade Jenkens]

Wow! Really looking forward to all this.

I hope they keep all the NASA parts in a KSP style though.

[Shuttle]

Will be there money in 0.24? Or only random missions and if you complete it you'll get nothing?

04:50 - Harv mentioned "advanced cache rewards", "big reward on success"

[Dispatcher]

Excellent summary, and your English is better than my Russian. Thank you!

[astropapi1]

Aw, thanks for this.

[czokletmuss]

14:10 Multiplayer

It is going to take a while. Jesus is working hard on server side. Nothing worth showing at this point. Currently working on the server backend structure.

Boy, they want to have multiplayer ans they mean it

Just a joke, one of my friends from Spain has this name.

[Whirligig Girl]

It's Gene not Jim Kerman.

[RoboRay]

Parts bigger than 5m? That's a dramatic increase.

They did tell NASA that KSP is scaled down an order of magnitude from real life, right?

[Lundmunchkins]

Please tell me the NASA Pack will be free!

[deadshot462]

Please tell me the NASA Pack will be free!

Rowsdower/Max said the pack would be free in the previous week's livestream.

[Dodgey]

Thanks for this list, it's such a bright future ladies and gentleman.

[Comrade Jenkens]

Parts bigger than 5m? That's a dramatic increase.

They did tell NASA that KSP is scaled down an order of magnitude from real life, right?

I assume that they will be 5m or something simply to fit into the correct scale. A full sized SLS could probably grand tour the kerbal system

[astropapi1]

Rowsdower/Max said the pack would be free in the previous week's livestream.

Aw. Yis.

Man, I wouldn't want to repeat the hassle I went through to buy KSP in the first place... Being less than 18 and not having a credit card in this world is hard.

[PDCWolf]

1:28 Problem with the NASA thing is that it kinda started eating everything else

If somebody didn't expect this to happen like CAREER MODE, or SCIENCE!, or MULTIPLAYER!, really, they are missing a few candies on their jar.

3:45 Harv about contracts

Contracts are not scripted event-driven missions!

Think about contracts as quests, freely given objectives, you can accept or ignore them.

There will be a panelty for a failure.

Missions don't end and don't repeat themselves because they are dynamically generated based on different templates.

For example, contract for a test flight. Contractors are both well known like Rockomax and completely new.

Contractors will offer player things that they want him to do. If it is a manufacturer, they might want you to test their part in particular situation. It might be easy (test SAS on the launch pad) and hard (test SAS on Eelo). This is just one of the templates.

The system will be improved in the future, this is just first step.

Called it, skyrim style "infinite quests" contracts. Exactly what I get for expecting more.

9:40 Wobbling

One tweak in the latest Unity turned out to be a gamechanger for developers.

Devs are not getting rid of wobble entirely, they want to have control over it, to give players wobble that makes sense.

Devs are trying to have as much control as they can so they can have wobbly connections where they should be wobbly and sturdier connections where they shouldn't be.

12:55 "Hopefully, we can also alleviate the need to spam using strut connectors everywhere"

Will keep some hope for this one.

16:30 Tutorials

Working hard on them right now, a lot of good progress . Marco works on tutorials, not Harv. Mun tutorials completely redone. New science tutorial, advanced construction tutorial incoming.

Devs don't want to take player by hand and walk him through the entire game. They don't want tutorials to take away the sense of accomplishment, finally understanding how to do something.

Kind of a contradicting statement.

19:45 NASA pack

Working with NASA on separate add-on pack

You can consider it as an official mod

It will be released separately from .24 and will require .24

Two separate releases (as far as I understand, Harv meant .24 and NASA pack): NASA pack will come afterwards because it requires many core modifications

Chad's working on new content for the pack that will include a lot of replicas of actual NASA parts (including SLS)

SLS is massive, devs are creating a new size of parts for this; it will make Jumbo look like a little tank.

Such a big parts are only possible because of new joint system, new joints are a lot more stable

25:45 Asteroids

Harv has been working on a system that will generate asteroids

31:00 Don't expect asteroids to be large

32:30 Small tweaks

36:30 Harv goes away

I really want to see how "asteroids not on tracks" work.

37:31 - QA, worth watching

Giant parts - part of the asteroid mode (?) or part of the stock? Stock.

One new big fuel tank with engine makes up for 6 Jumbos+6 Rockomax engines. Maxmaps doesn't know the exact diametr.

39:40 ASTEROIDS NOT ON RAILS!

~39:42 asteroids spawning all over the place at random areas\orbits, some will get captured by Kerbin, some will impact Kerbin. Asteroids will be able to crash into your spacestation

Gravity on asteroids - no, because asteroids are tiny, 10-30 meters large. But devs control the size

How many asteroids? Quite a few

Capture an asteroid with shuttle cargo bay? I forgot the exact answer, but AFAIR yes, if it is not too big.

So instead of asteroids we get loner rocks. I hope at least there's a lot of them.

[The Jedi Master]

Kerbin hit by asteroids? That will be interesting to see.

[Richy teh space man]

Thanks for the list, this helps some.

[Woopert]

Thanks for posting this!

[Soda Popinski]

It's based on the NASA asteroid capture plan. I think they're aiming for capping a < 20 meter diameter near Earth asteroid. We're not talking ginormous asteroid. This should be very doable for the average KSPer.

I do wonder if the SLS components will be the real world 8.4 meter diameter, or will they be scaled down to Kerbal size a bit. A 1:1 scale SLS system seems overkill for Kerbin's gravity / size.

[Comrade Jenkens]

I do wonder if the SLS components will be the real world 8.4 meter diameter, or will they be scaled down to Kerbal size a bit. A 1:1 scale SLS system seems overkill for Kerbin's gravity / size.

Well we managed to work out kerbals were 2.2 times smaller than a human.

If the SLS is a similar scale; 8.4 / 2.2 = 3.82.

As 3.75 is one of the standard sizes all the mods use it would make sense to be that size as well.

[RTS321]

39:40 ASTEROIDS NOT ON RAILS!

~39:42 asteroids spawning all over the place at random areas\orbits, some will get captured by Kerbin, some will impact Kerbin. Asteroids will be able to crash into your spacestation

Gravity on asteroids - no, because asteroids are tiny, 10-30 meters large. But devs control the size

How many asteroids? Quite a few

Capture an asteroid with shuttle cargo bay? I forgot the exact answer, but AFAIR yes, if it is not too big.

This is what I find the most interesting, albeit purely from a technical standpoint. If they are not 'on rails', then as far as I can see the game will need to do physics on them to calculate their velocity and draw their orbits, just like flights in progress that you can see from map view. This is fine with small numbers, but as demonstrated here, as the number of flights increases, it has a very noticeable effect on the framerate. I wonder if, unlike part count, it will be possible to address this source of poor performance. I hope this gives the devs the incentive to try.