A large part of this update was just below the surface, refactoring our old code and tackling some technical debt. Nathan took a quick hiatus from mod support to perform major surgery on the game loop and it has significantly improved performance for large craft. From our testing, we've seen an FPS increase of over 30% for some crafts.
I refactored all of the fuel code so that we could support some new features to give you more control over how your crafts consume their fuel (I mean propellant...sorry, Kell). Now you can re-prioritize your fuel tanks, drain from multiple tanks at once, and even automate fuel transfer using cross feeds, which are available on any new interstage part you pull out from the part list.
Kevin revisited the fuselage parts and rebuilt their meshes to remove unnecessary complexity and improve game performance, undoubtedly contributing to the 30% FPS boost I mentioned earlier. Then he went through all of the fuselage textures with a fine tooth comb and fixed issues with alignment that had cropped up in a few bug reports. After that, he freshened up the loading screens to be more reflective of the game's current state.
William added a new, resizable gyroscope part, so now your crafts don't need to have a command pod for that. The power of the gyro is based on its size. He also incorporated four new songs from Fat Bard (the music guys).
Philip has been working on procedural landing gear, but that didn't make this update. We are hoping to get that in the next update, in a few weeks.
Here are the nitty gritty details:
FEATURES
- Added multi-directional RCS part.
- Added gyroscope part.
- Performance improvements. From our testing, we've seen large craft have up to a 30% increase in FPS.
- New loading screens.
- Docking ports can now be targeted, which makes docking a lot easier.
- Added fuel tank priority so the player can change the order in which fuel tanks are drained.
- Added fuel crossfeed option to side interstage part.
- Allow draining from multiple fuel tanks at the same time when they are set to the same priority.
- Added shortcut to open Performance Analyzer window in the designer. Bound to 'O' by default.
- Added an option to disable ambient light attenuation in the game settings.
- Added more music.
TWEAKS
- Added button to the Part Inspector to select a part's command pod during flight.
- Display fuselage radius and length when resizing in the designer.
- Added Propellant Mass to Performance Analyzer window in the designer.
- The explode part button now must be clicked twice before actually exploding the part. Safety first.
- Slightly increased the default ambient light in space.
- Tweaked exhaust visuals for underexpansion and overexpansion.
- Added a progress bar for fuel in the fuel tank inspector window.
- Paint Emission Setting Now Allows 1% Increments.
- Added tool-tips for replication/control options on command pod's flight scene inspector panel.
BUG FIXES
- Fixed a bug where the center of mass of the craft would not update during flight in some circumstances.
- Fixed a bug with opening a craft/sandbox via file associations resulting in launching the game but not actually loading the craft/sandbox.
- Fixed a bug where rotating a part with the keyboard would sometimes rotate the wrong part.
- Fixed a bug with overlapping text on the dummy inspector window.
- Fixed a bug where engines would not continue throttling to last known throttle input after separating from their commmand pod.
- Fixed a bug where the part shape tool would not hide its grid after the player had finished dragging with the mouse.
- Fixed a bug where disconnected parts would show up in staging display in flight scene.
- Fixed the rotation direction of the planet in the main menu :D
- Fixed issue which can cause a craft to whip around after undocking if the current heading is locked.
- Fixed visual tearing on orbit lines when moving camera very rapidly in map view.
- Fixed bug which would occur when the current navigation target is destroyed.
- Improved the handling of invalid part styles, preventing them from modifying the part style list of all parts of the same type.
KNOWN ISSUES
- The game occasionally hangs on exit.
- Cross feeds are not included in delta-v calculations or active fuel levels. I'm not sure if they ever will, but I do plan to investigate.
- Multi-directional RCS can malfunction if a new stage is activated while the RCS is receiving input. Quick Save and Quick Load should fix the issue if you encounter it before we fix it.