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Devnote Tuesdays: The "Already Lining up for Black Friday" Edition

SQUAD

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in KSP1 The Daily Kerbal

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SQUAD

SQUAD

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<p><img src="https://31.media.tumblr.com/0ff9377afa68dc3ad3fe6844aaf1bd38/tumblr_inline_nf9hbu3E9U1rr2wit.jpg"/></p>

<p><span> </span><strong>Felipe (HarvesteR)</strong><span><strong>:</strong> Quite a lot of work done this week, mainly around setting up the new KSC facilities. We’ve now got interiors for each new level of the SPH and VAB, and I got the game to load the correct interior scene for the correct level of the correct editor. The decision to merge the editor scenes into one and split the scenery into other scenes that are loaded additively was a very good one, indeed. This was only done at first to not require us to maintain two mostly identical scenes updated through the overhaul, but when it was time to implement loading different interior sceneries for each level of the SPH or VAB, the merged scene implementation made life a LOT easier. What more, because each interior lives in its own scene, memory usage is very efficient. We only need to load the data for the interior we’re going to display. The rest is sitting pretty on file until called for (and unneeded data is unloaded also). The scenery setup is also done in such a way that any facilities you can see out the door of the construction buildings is also updated, so it shows up at the right level and correct state of repair. If you smash your level 1 mission control building and then move into the SPH, you’ll get to see the smashed up level 1.MC building from the open doorway, regardless of the level of the SPH or any other external factors. Unless of course, the SPH is also destroyed, in which case you can’t even enter it, let alone view anything out of a doorway that no longer exists</span></p>

<p><span>Apart from interior scenes and their scenery, I’ve also got the interior backdrops for the not-so-3D facilities working and switching based on facility level. The Astronaut Complex, Administration, R&D (archives) and Mission Control facilities now each have multiple interior images, which are used depending on the level of the facility. I’ve also done a few tweaks to the VAB and SPH cameras, to make them respect the bounds set up by the interiors. A small VAB or SPH doesn’t give you as much room to scroll about as the larger levels do, so we needed a way to have the cameras stay within the bounds of each interior. That’s taken care of as well.</span></p>

<p><span>Next up is the ‘business end’ of the whole system, and hopefully one of the last big steps required on it: Actually implementing the gameplay effects of facility upgrades. So far, we’ve got a nice and functional system where facilities can be upgraded, destroyed, saved and loaded and see their internal and external meshes change as a function of that, plus the UI to perform the upgrades and all that, but all this would be for naught if there were no gameplay effect in upgrading facilities. This was something we gave a LOT of thought to. It’s one of the oldest planned features, so there were mentions of possible upgrade effects even in the earliest design notes, from almost 4 years ago. I went through all of those, remembering the best ideas from back then, and sorting out the good ones from those that became obsolete as the game evolved. We now have a list of several effects for upgrading facilities, which affect many different aspects of the game, IMO, in very significant ways. More on this as it develops though.</span></p>

<p><span><strong>Alex (aLeXmOrA):</strong> </span><span>Last week I discovered and fixed an internal issue with our KSP Store website. I also dealt with some accounting transactions here at Squad HQ. Now, I’m going to update my local project of the game, so I can catch up with the development. .</span></p>

<p><strong>Mike (Mu):</strong><span> I have been working on the kerbal experience traits and effects. We have been experimenting and have zeroed in on a really interesting set of traits for kerbals to have.</span></p>

<p><span><strong>Marco (Samssonart):</strong> </span><span>Last week was all about particle FX - making sure every building with a unique collapse animation has a few important parts. First of all, it has to make sense. Things shouldn’t just blow up à la Michael Bay, i.e. just because. There has to be a reason why something blows up. Based on that reason, it exerts the amount of fire, smoke and overall awesomeness we can expect from it. One more technical requirement for these FX is that they must serve as a curtain to perform the old switcharoo with the building models. There is a transition between the normal building and it’s wrecked counterpart. One that is…er…quite obvious, so we have to create a literal smoke screen in order to make it less notorious.</span></p>

<p><span>As of today I’m back with the building markers. I’m taking care of a few unsolved bugs I had pending to have them ready for experimentals.</span></p>

<p><strong>Daniel (danRosas)</strong><span><strong>:</strong> Modeling, texturing, tweaking in Unity. Modeling, texturing and moving back to Unity. That’s the way this last week has been. That includes prefabs, .fbx files, textures, normal maps generation and the sort.</span></p>

<p><strong>Jim (Romfarer)</strong><span><strong>:</strong> This week I’ve mainly been working on a secondary method to add parts to custom categories. Basically it works like this: When you have set up one or more custom categories in the toolbar, a ‘+’ button will appear on each part icon. Click it to open a popup where you can select which custom category to drop it in. The feature has not been tested out yet but I’m pretty sure it will become more popular than the previously implemented feature, which works much the same as subassemblies.</span></p>

<p><span>In other news, I got the new computer delivered late last week and I’ve been spending some time getting everything set up on it. And i also caught the flu bad this weekend.</span></p>

<p><span><strong>Max (Maxmaps):</strong> .</span><span>Did a little bit of multiplayer design stuff with Chuchito which seems to be working well so far. Also organizing stuff for events in the future which is time consuming and dependent on a lot of long, long chains of emails. Nothing too exciting but it’s work that needed to be done. Other than that, we’ve been pushing hard to get everything into the hands of experimentals testers.</span></p>

<p><strong>Ted (Ted):</strong><span> Another busy week here, tied in with a bad cold that I’ve thankfully gotten passed the worst of. </span></p>

<p><span>I’ve been getting the feature documentation arranged to be ready for Experimentals. This means updating and elaborating on a lot of the information already existing in the QA Feature Docs, as well as formatting it to be a bit prettier.</span></p>

<p><span>Moving on, we had a nice, long meeting about the direction to take the Kerbal Experience effects and the effects that upgrading your facilities will have on your space program and the like. I should think that a lot of people will be very pleased with the direction the KXP effects are going, I won’t spill the beans just yet on that as we’re in the early phase of implementing the effects and these things can be tentative.</span></p>

<p><span>To go off on a tangent, I’ve also been battling with our build server here to build for Linux, it insists on failing repeatedly while the other platforms succeed. This <a href="

"><strong>CLIP</strong></a> from Office Space comes to mind right about now.<br/></span></p>

<p><span>Hopefully, we’ve almost gotten to the bottom of it and will have it building for the Penguin Platform in no time.</span></p>

<p><span>Back to QA Testing, we’ve also been testing out the stockification of Fine Print and Arsonide has been working with us on touching up the finer points of it to blend further in with stock UI and behaviour. I have to say that it’s looking great and I’m really liking the addition of Fine Print to stock.</span></p>

<p><span>On the Mk3 parts’ side of things, we’re going through the feedback there and implementing the changes that the QA testers have suggested. A notable one is that the Mk3 fuselage parts are named “Rocket Fuel” instead of “LF+O”, so I’ve renamed the Mk2 parts to align with that and the Mk1 Fuselage is also renamed to Mk1 Liquid Fuel Fuselage. This should make the purpose of the parts a lot more apparent to any new players.</span></p>

<p><span>Lastly, I’ve also been looking into and pre-emptively planning further revisions to the Bug Tracker workflow, utilizing sub-projects to further organise issues that we log during QA. It’s early days on the idea, but I’m thinking that these changes could do a lot to improve efficiency for everyone involved.</span></p>

<p><span><strong>Anthony (Rowsdower):</strong> I’m on Twitch stream overload. Who are some of your favorite non-KSP streamers? Give me something to watch! Speaking of Twitch, I must exclaim how proud I am of the KSP-TV crew. They went from having reached the 10,000 sub mark, then lost a noticeable bunch, thanks to Twitch being Twitch and are now somewhere in the 13,000 range and growing each day. Not too shabby. Golf claps all around.</span><span> </span></p>

<p><span>For those wondering about the title of this devnote, btw, I was just kind of out of ideas. For those actually lining up for Black Friday right now, I hope you’ve bundled up.</span></p>

<p><strong>Kasper (KasperVld):</strong><span> This week reminded me more of what moderating was 2-3 weeks ago for me: despite a few small bumps everything went pretty smooth and I got to work on that <a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entries/3184-On-criticism"><strong>BLOG</strong></a> I promised you guys. I threw out two earlier versions and there is a lot more that can be discussed on this subject, but in the end, the most important things are in. Post any questions, comments and criticism (!) in the comments and I’ll get back to you as soon as I wade through the dozens of spam emails that a public email address receives every hour.</span></p>

<p><span>In space news, I’m sure you’ve all watched the Rosetta landing. Truly a history making piece of work right there. Those of you who follow me on Twitter probably found their timelines spammed with all sorts of retweets, answers, questions and more (sorry). Speaking of Twitter, one of the most interesting KSP channels to follow there is no doubt the <a href="https://twitter.com/KSA_MissionCtrl"><strong>KERBAL SPACE AGENCY</strong></a> If you ever find yourself lost for inspiration on what your next mission should be you can browse through their tweets and pick something you’d like to attempt as well - and those 140 character mission updates are eerily reminiscent of what real space agencies put out on the web.</span></p>

<p><span>Finally I’m very interested in how you experience the current forum, what functions do you like and what functions are missing? Think of things such as a built-in image gallery, new BB codes or a better WYSIWYG editor interface. I’d love to hear from you through forum PM or by sending an email to <strong>[email protected]</strong></span></p>

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Solivagant

Solivagant

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Yay, another devotes! A small suggestion, it seems like it'll be easier to load interior SPH/VAB scenes, so would it be possible to reflect the time of day outside the KSC within those buildings? It's always irked me that it could be the dead of night but as soon as I enter either building, it's glorious sunshine. Otherwise, things look like there're shaping up really nicely! Thanks for the tons of work you guys are putting in.

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Alshain

Alshain

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Yay, another devotes! A small suggestion, it seems like it'll be easier to load interior SPH/VAB scenes, so would it be possible to reflect the time of day outside the KSC within those buildings? It's always irked me that it could be the dead of night but as soon as I enter either building, it's glorious sunshine. Otherwise, things look like there're shaping up really nicely! Thanks for the tons of work you guys are putting in.

Seconded. I mean if your working on dynamic updating of the scenes anyway... please and thank you!

Great devnotes.

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White Owl

White Owl

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The rest is sitting pretty on file until called for (and unneeded data is unloaded also).

Whoah, hold up a second there! Do you mean unneeded data for the unused facilities is unloaded, or do you mean unneeded data for other things in the game is unloaded? Huge difference, with a potentially huge impact on everybody with a modded game.

Very happy to see the VAB and SPH combined. Some of us like building vertical launch vehicles in the SPH. Looks excellent to have the same building tools available.

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Catman2021

Catman2021

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Excellent work everyone! 3rd-ing the implementation of a day/night cycle within the VAB and SPH. I sure hope no one is lining up for Black Friday a week and two days early (especially with the multiple inches/feet of snow in parts of the continental US).

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Superfluous J

Superfluous J

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HarvesteR said:

<p><span>Next up is the ‘business end’ of the whole system, and hopefully one of the last big steps required on it: Actually implementing the gameplay effects of facility upgrades. So far, we’ve got a nice and functional system where facilities can be upgraded, destroyed, saved and loaded and see their internal and external meshes change as a function of that, plus the UI to perform the upgrades and all that, but all this would be for naught if there were no gameplay effect in upgrading facilities. This was something we gave a LOT of thought to. It’s one of the oldest planned features, so there were mentions of possible upgrade effects even in the earliest design notes, from almost 4 years ago. I went through all of those, remembering the best ideas from back then, and sorting out the good ones from those that became obsolete as the game evolved. We now have a list of several effects for upgrading facilities, which affect many different aspects of the game, IMO, in very significant ways. More on this as it develops though.</span></p>

(emphasis mine)

How did you get out of that

"We've busted our ass and spent tons of time and effort making the it look good"

"Now we have to figure out what it does..."

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Frank_G

Frank_G

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Thank you for these awesome Dev Notes. .90 seems to get pretty big in all aspects. And just to mention, KSP didnt loose a single bit of awesomeness since i began playing 11 months ago. Instead, awesomeness increased with each update and i am really looking forward to see the new features and polishes in action, making our upcoming space even more colorful.

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Geneborg

Geneborg

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You seem to put alot of time into this new "buildings" feature, i hope it will turn out to be worth it. Personally, i love visual representations of progress in a game, but it takes quite some time to do.

Love the editor changes btw, probably my most wanted feature yet with all the little tools we otherwise had to use mods for.

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Frank_G

Frank_G

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Well it seems like there are construction options bound to the different tiers of the buildings. I bet this will not only add eye candy, but also add challenge and force the player to improvise. I am really looking forward to this.

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HarvesteR

HarvesteR

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Yay, another devotes! A small suggestion, it seems like it'll be easier to load interior SPH/VAB scenes, so would it be possible to reflect the time of day outside the KSC within those buildings? It's always irked me that it could be the dead of night but as soon as I enter either building, it's glorious sunshine. Otherwise, things look like there're shaping up really nicely! Thanks for the tons of work you guys are putting in.

Possible, yes. Feasible in the time available, much less so. The interior scenes are one of the few (and very few indeed) places where we use static lightmapping to light up the scene. The outside light plays a large part in this, so creating a dynamic time-of-day effect in the editors would require us to either drop lightmapping altogether, something I really wouldn't like to do, or set up many variations for the scene lighting and switch between those too.

That would be another ton on top of the tons of work we're already doing. Not saying it couldn't look cool, but there are probably more interesting features to add given a finite amount of time and manpower. :)

Cheers

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