Hello Kerbonauts, happy new year!
We had a lot riding on the For Science! update that we released two weeks ago - it's been a long first year of Early Access, filled with the arduous and mostly unglamorous pursuit of bugs, stability improvements, and performance gains. This update, the first of our major roadmap updates, had to achieve some big new goals for KSP2:
- Round out the core game loop with re-entry heating and buoyancy
- Introduce a whole new progression system via the R&D Center and Mission Control
- Introduce Science collection, Science parts, and dozens of new points of interest
- Continue to deliver quality of life improvements (like banishing wobbly rockets) and performance improvements
Also: there are boat docks now! In a nutshell, the additional of Exploration Mode transformed KSP2 from a sandbox experience into a proper long-form game.
With working on something with many moving parts, there's always a little trepidation when we release a new build to the public - especially when there are so many new systems in play. We do our best to test every possible scenario, but there's always a chance that something terrifying will rear its head once we’ve got thousands of people playing the game. It was with this fear lurking in the backs of our heads that we sat together in our own mission control room and waited for confirmation that For Science! had been released into the world.
We nervously watched the first review videos appear of YouTube, and were relieved to discover that veteran players like Carnasa and Matt Lowne were excited about what they found in the new update. We cycled between Everyday Astronaut, EJ_SA, and Giantwaffle, discovering to our delight that all three were not only having fun, but were having trouble putting the game down! By the time we did our own livestream that evening, it was clear that we'd succeeded in creating a more stable and realistic universe and gave players compelling goals to pursue within that universe. Our stream ran over an hour longer than planned because we too had trouble putting it down. That's a story we're hearing a lot - you sit down to play this game for an hour, and before you know it the sun's coming up.
Over the last couple of weeks, a clear picture has emerged - there are still bugs, as well as some big opportunities to improve the player experience - but for the most part, those rough edges have not gotten in the way of some very ambitious exploratory missions. I’ll talk more about those bugs in a bit, but first I’d like to highlight some of this update’s biggest wins:
- The music. Yes, you all love Howard Mostrom. We’re going to need a bigger inbox for all his fan mail.
- The tutorials and first-time user experience have paved the way for a new group of first-time Kerbal players. We’re not only seeing lots of you get to space, we’re also seeing a lot more players doing interplanetary missions. In many ways, the original justification for KSP2’s existence was to find a way to welcome more new players to Kerbal, and we’re very excited to see that this work has begun to bear fruit. We knew that bringing rocket science to the masses wasn’t going to be easy, and there’s still a lot more work to do in this area...but we’re making progress!
- Folks are enjoying the missions! We’re excited to continue adding new missions to the game via upcoming updates, and we’d love to hear your suggestions for compelling new exploration goals.
- In general, we’re beginning to see the flourishing of player creativity that we knew would take place once the most critical performance and usability issues had been ironed out. It’s been a pleasure to visit the KSP Subreddit and our #bestof channel on Discord and bask in the awesomeness. People are making magnificent things, and it feels nice to see all that imagination unleashed.
Look at this stuff!
Courtesy of Aravir
Courtesy of Flypig07UA
Courtesy of Dr. Seno
Courtesy of BioticKeen
Of course, a key benefit to our game being in Early Access is that we get detailed bug reports and feedback from a wide variety of players. And boy, did we get a big helping after releasing this update. Check out the spike we saw on our K.E.R.B. bug submissions at the end of December:
There are some annoying bugs and usability issues in the mix - some are new, some have been around for a while but have risen in prominence now that other more consequential problems have been addressed. Some areas of frustration include:
- Font scale and legibility
- The maneuver node interface
- Thermal system tuning, including the propensity of some parts to explode even when they’re shielded and the insufficiency of fairings to protect their contents)
- One-off stability issues (most of which can be corrected by reloading or restarting)
We are triaging and trying to reproduce issues related to things like parachutes failing to deploy, trajectories vanishing from the map view, and Delta-V accuracy (which given the dependency of maneuver plans on accurate Delta-V projection, can result in being blocked from planning a maneuver). We’ve also noted some user experience gaps, most notably the game’s failure to properly communicate to new players that "Revert to VAB" is different from "Return to VAB" - an oversight that has led some newcomers to lose their progress after completing a mission.
I’ll also take this moment to offer a new protip that I learned today after complaining to Chris Adderley about my spaceplane wings being destroyed on re-entry: while the heavier wings are more heat-resistant, the volume of every wing (and especially the wing’s thickness) affects its thermal mass. A thicker wing will be more resistant to destruction via heat! I’ll be trying out the "fat wings" approach tonight after work. Procedural wings sure are cool.
Anyway, back to bugs. If you’re one of the people who have come up against a truly blocking or fun-destroying issue, please do take the time to share that information with us via the KSP Forums. We’re seeing less of this after the For Science! update, but it’s still something we want to investigate aggressively when it’s encountered.
We’re already hard at work on the v0.2.1.0 incremental update to address as many of these issues as we can, and we’ll update you here as soon as we know the exact timing and contents of that update. In the meantime, thank you for continuing to share your bug reports and feedback - your detailed reporting continues to play a huge role in helping us to improve the game.
Another exciting new development: modders have started to produce some extremely cool augmentations for KSP2, including Orbital Survey, an alarm clock mod (already heading towards 2,000 downloads!), and there's even some planet modding underway! Our team is especially happy to see that the extensible tech tree file format created with future moddability in mind has paved the way for things like the new Tech Tree Manager mod.
The Orbital Survey mod
The 2.5x Kerbolar System mod
The next major roadmap update, which will bring colonies to the game, is now also in progress. In the meantime, the current plan is to sneak a few additional missions into the next incremental update, just to keep things fresh. Now that there are interesting things to do in the game, we’re very excited about all the ways that we can continue adding new layers to that experience in the coming year while knocking out the bugs that remain. 2024 is going to be a very exciting year for KSP2, both for the players and for us developers!
Nate
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