KSP Weekly: Women in space and more!

Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. Today is the 54th anniversary of the Vostok 6’s launch and with it one of the greatest achievements in terms of gender equality. On this mission, Valentina Tereshkova became the first female cosmonaut to have flown in space and she wouldn’t be the last. Nevertheless, space programs were slow to employ women, and it would not be until almost 20 years later that another flew. Names like Svetlana Savitskaya, Sally Ride and Mae Jemison come to mind when we think of female astronauts, and even though women continued to be included in astronaut programs in the following years, the male-female ratio was still greatly unbalanced. But the space industry is rapidly becoming more equal. For example, NASA’s 2013 astronaut class is composed of 4 men and 4 women, and all of them are possible candidates for a human mission to Mars. We hope that this tendency expands to all other space programs and that we finally have a fair ratio of men and women in the aerospace industry all around the globe. It’s in our best interest to include all human beings who can positively contribute in building our future, regardless of their gender, race, or sexual orientation. But let’s begin to talk about the latest news in KSP development, since that’s what you came here for.

This week we did a great variety of things, including some catch-up on the bugtracker and following the forums to try and identify any post release issues that will need attention in the next patch. At the same time, the overall status of the public tracker is being appraised with a view to a thorough cleanup and bringing everything up to date, which of course will be a mammoth undertaking. Much was achieved in the last attempt, but there is still room for improvement.

Furthermore, we did some bug fixing for 1.3.1 including, but not limited to: a change to the camera clipping pane, so we don’t have to see what Kerbal’s have been eating for breakfast when you zoom right in on them, and the addition of a KSC building shadow shader fix to the SPH/VAB scenes. We also fixed the alignment of settings in some UI elements, as well as a problem in 1.3 with vessels that have fuel lines or struts inside fairings exploding on launch. Similarly, we applied a better fix for sun shadows so the shadow flickering remains reduced (as it is in 1.3), but restored the sun motion across the sky to be as smooth as it was before 1.3. On top of that, we added a long requested “Control from Here” action groups to Wheel motors, steering and Docking Ports, as well as to External command seats (and action group).

We not only did some bughunting for the core game, consoles got their fair share too, and the console builds are coming along nicely and stability is still looking good. We are now focusing on finding ways to improve the gameplay, while making sure that all aspects of the game are accessible using the controllers and menus, and that they are intuitive for new and veteran players alike. Additionally, there’s been another QA pass of the KSPedia on the consoles, highlighting any spacing or layout issues, and checking for accuracy. Soon we’ll have more testing hands to help us find any remaining issues.

In other news, we carried on fine tuning and tweaking various aspects of the design and architecture for the Making History Expansion. The designers and devs have been breaking down the iterations of design elements in our Story Planning process and cross checking and planning things out. Coupled with that, there has been the regular code review processes, which have been substantial this week. Let’s go through some juicy details: There’s been some work on several new windows for the expansion like the Part Picker that will let the creator choose what parts will be made available in their missions to the player. Likewise, the devs have been getting a feature for visualizing celestial bodies in the Mission Builder ready and getting that merged into the main branch. It is now integrated alongside the rest of the Mission Builder environment and it provides surface information, which will be very useful for several future tasks related to planets. It also has no problem with any size of celestial body or if they have PQS or not (like gas giants) allowing the Mission Creator to rotate and zoom in and out on any celestial body.

Moreover, we have completed the Mission Briefing Dialog, which allows the mission creator to fill out the details of their planned adventure. Missions have a tagging system, similar to the way parts do in the editor so creators and players can identify and search more easily. In like manner we continue to work on some of the more complex initialization code so the creator can “set-up” the solar system with the vessels needed for their story. This involves giving the creator access to instantiate vessels in various situations, and at various points in the mission, all without spawning inside Jool and awakening the kraken.

And that’s not all, we are also working on a the undo/redo functionality for the mission editor, as well as handling the implementation of a snazzier version of the UI for mission nodes, all while the QA team starts to look at some parts and sample missions.

And of course, we cannot forget about the aesthetic part of the expansion’s work. This week the work on the UI design continued, as well as some new gizmos that will be used to manipulate a wide host of things, like translations and rotations, just to name a few. The artists also focused on the Russian parts, doing some minor model updates and other tweaks from QA, and also began work on our first Russian engine. While the model is wrapped up and ready for art review, it looks like you will have to wait until the texturing work is complete for a preview.

Finally, we encourage you to participate in our latest KSP Challenge - All Praise Cthulhu! This time around, we’ll make a small homage to one of our favorite horror fiction authors by making an offering for the dark cosmic entity and bring it to the dead Kraken in Bop. Are you up to the challenge? Check it out and share your creations!

That’s it for this week. Be sure to join us on our official forums, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Stay tuned for more exciting and upcoming news and development updates!

Happy launchings!