Hello! It’s been a while!
I know that many of you have been wondering about the status of KSP2, so I thought I’d give you an update on how things are going.
We have an incremental update on the way! The v0.2.2.0 update will address a number of common user experience issues, some of which have been causing frustration for quite a while. In many cases, a thing that was reported as a single bug (Delta-V calculations being incorrect, or trajectory lines being broken) were actually half a dozen or more closely related bugs.
We identified a series of issues that we believed were negatively impacting moment-to-moment gameplay and the first-time user experience, and we dug deep into those bug clusters to make meaningful improvements. Some of those issues include:
- Parachutes don’t deploy reliably (doubly true when fairings are in the mix)
- Fairings don’t protect their contents from heating
- Trajectory lines in the map view sometimes disappear (often related to erroneous designation of craft as “landed” when in flight)
- Landed vehicles fall through terrain during time warp
- Maneuver nodes refuse to allow the player to plan beyond the calculated Delta-V allowance, which in many cases is an incorrect value
We’ve submitted changes to address a number of these issues – in the case of the last one, we’ll just be letting you plan beyond your current dV allowance while we continue to improve our Delta-V accuracy over the longer term (there’s a very challenging set of problems to solve in the pursuit of accurate Delta-V projections for every possible vehicle that a player can make, so this is something we’ll likely be refining for quite a while).
For this update, we’ve also prioritized a new kind of issue: in some cases, the first-time user experience is undermined by a failure of the UI to clearly communicate how to progress between phases of gameplay – put simply, we sometimes put new players in a position where they don’t know what they’re supposed to do next. We’ve received a huge quantity of very helpful user feedback in this area since the For Science! Update. For example, since most of us are seasoned KSP veterans, it never occurred to us that we hadn’t fully communicated that “revert to VAB” is a very different thing from “return to VAB.” We received a rash of bug reports from people who were confused about having lost progress after completing their missions and reverting to VAB. Yikes! Similarly, the lack of a clear call to action when a vehicle can be recovered frequently left new players staring at a landed vehicle and not knowing there were more steps to follow. We’ve made some UI changes to address issues like this, and we think the flow has improved as a result.
Another usability issue that even catches me out on occasion -- trying to do illegal actions (for example, parachute deployment) while in time warp states other than 1x. In fact, we believe quite a few bug reports we’ve gotten about actions being broken have actually been the result of people attempting to do things under time warp that weren’t allowed. This is an area of ongoing work for us – not only do we need to do a better job of communicating to the player when they’re warping, but we also need to make clear what actions are and are not allowed under both physics and on-rails time warp. We’ve made some small UI changes to increase the player’s awareness of their time warp state, and we’re looking forward to seeing if those changes feel good to you. I know we talk a lot about the value of Early Access, but this is a great example of how your reporting helps us target our efforts.
We still haven’t nailed down the exact date for this update, but we’ll notify you here once we’re on final approach.
Most of our team continues to be pointed squarely at the Colonies update. We’re making a lot of progress this month on colony founding, the colony assembly experience, and colony gameplay mechanics. There are lots of interesting problems to solve here – some are super obvious (colony parts exist at a wide range of scales, and the Base Assembly Editor – the colony version of a VAB - needs to feel equally good when you’re connecting a small truss or a giant hab module). Other issues – for example, how vehicles interact with colonies on both the systems and physics levels – come with a lot of edge cases that need to be satisfied. We remain very excited about the ways colony gameplay will move KSP2 into completely new territory, and we’re definitely eager to see what our legendarily creative players do with these new systems.
In parallel with our colony work, we’re continuing to find significant opportunities to improve performance and stability. We just made a change to PQS decals that got us huge memory usage improvements – mostly VRAM (this one is still being tested, so it won’t go into the v0.2.2.0 update – but I was just so excited about the improvement that I had to share):
And of course, while all this work is going on, Ghassen Lahmar (aka Blackrack) continues to make big strides with clouds. Here’s a peek at some of the improvements he’s working on today (yep, that’s multiple layers)!
And because the VFX team can’t ever stop making things better, they’ve begun an overhaul of exhaust plumes to bring them more in line with reality (which thankfully is also quite beautiful):
Thanks as always for sticking with us as we work through each challenge – we couldn’t be more grateful to have your support as we move toward the Colonies era!
Keep up with all things Kerbal Space Program 🚀
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