These two weeks were very productive. I’ve spent them stabilizing the game after the release of v0.22.0 update. I got a lot of good feedback and bug reports and fixed most of them. Now I'm satisfied with the quality of the update and can move to the development of v0.23 version. I have big plans for it and prepared a huge list of changes I want to make. As always I will uncover some of them in a future dev update.
Now let’s move to highlights for this patch. First of all, I’ve added an ablative variant for each heat shield. You can now configure the thickness of the ablation layer and it will resist the radiative heating which appears when you enter the atmosphere at speeds higher than 9 km/sec. This allows you to make a return mission from the Moon or break against the planet’s atmosphere in the interplanetary flights. Be careful tho, this heat shield will not save you if the re-entry angle will be too steep.
A small but pleasant change: the heated shields are now emitting light.
I also fixed a lot of bugs that were in the game for years. For example, I finally found a way to deal with those circle artifacts visible on high Earth orbit. You can still notice the small ones, but they are much less prominent.
Earth no longer loses its atmosphere when you enter the Moon’s sphere of influence.
And a quick load made during the flight will finally load you directly into the flight!
You can find a full list of changes since v0.22.1 below. Thank you and see you in the v0.23 update!
v0.22.5 release notes
Features:
🔸 added ablative configuration variant for all heat shields;
🔸 you can change pass resources state on decoupler during the flight;
🔸 quick load during the flight will load directly into the flight;
🔸 state indicator on probe cores now change color depending on the state of probe core;
🔸 you can directly switch to select mode when right click on the part and the assembly is in rotate mode;
🔸 heat shields now glow when heated;
🔸 added "Lock thrust limiter" toggle to engines, so when it is enabled engines will ignore any global thrust limiter changes and keep its configured value;
🔸 added several additional tutorial steps to the base tutorial that explain side attachments and part configuration;
🔸 added protective "shadow cone" for heat shields, so side attached parts will not receive heating if they are covered by reentry shadow from the heat shield.
Changes:
🔸 improved bluntness calculations for reentry: partially occluded surfaces should not receive increased reentry heating like it was before;
🔸 significantly optimized spacecrafts list in the control center if it contains a lot of spacecrafts;
🔸 optimized thermodynamics system performance on time warps greater than 1h/sec
🔸 improved heat shield part tooltip in the assembly shop;
🔸 adjusted heat shields center of mass to make them more stable;
🔸 parts no longer heat at when they are oriented at 85-90 degrees relative to airflow;
🔸 increased max internal temperature for all decouplers;
🔸 scroll speed is the same in both directions, when adjusting maneuver using scroll wheel;
🔸 improved logging when rocket part is destroyed because of overheating;
🔸 activating the next stage will no longer override thrust limiter if it was previously set to any value other than 100%;
🔸 twr and burn time now recalculated for stage when changing the thrust limiter for engine in the assembly;
🔸 thrust limiter in part config in the assembly now have proper rangnes;
🔸 moved center of mass for all probe cores down a bit, to make them more aerodynamically stable;
🔸 tweaked parameters of parachute, so it is more resistant to reentry heating.
Fixes:
🔸 unstable thermodynamic simulation on high time warp;
🔸 exception after that part stats stop properly update in the part window;
🔸 "Clap" longitudinal decoupler not passing resources after docking;
🔸 sometimes game crashes when quick loading;
🔸 a lot of small bugs related to resource transfer via docking port module;
🔸 sudden rotation around y axis of spacecrafts when docking;
🔸 empty dropdowns in the navball mod;
🔸 fonts have different sizes in the surface mod;
🔸 part attachment systems sometimes breaks when reattaching small parts;
🔸 rare crash on reentry;
🔸 negative total mass when adding some parts, changing variants and then removing it;
🔸 planet atmosphere disappears in main menu if you replace spacecraft with custom one;
🔸 rotated heat shields generate wrong heat shadow;
🔸 fixed Earth losing its atmosphere on SOI change;
🔸 greatly reduced dot artifacts on planet surface on high altitudes;
🔸 Rumble decoupler overheat very quickly;
🔸 rocket state in flight (amount of fuel, etc) reset after save loading;
🔸 fins used as a rudder work incorrectly on some attachments;
🔸 fins control surfaces not correctly shown when symmetry is enabled;
🔸 infinite exception loop when trying to change side booster parameters;
🔸 combustion chamber rotates around up axis for no reason;
🔸 thrust limiter is showing as 0 in flight / assembly windows, when it set exactly to 50%;
🔸 memory leak when duplicating rocket;
🔸 tutorial stuck if you attached more parts to the rocket than was requested by the tutorial;
🔸 exception when opening the map using button in the control center (and back to spaceport);
🔸 engines attached to cockpit or rover become start rotating 90 degrees down if they have TVC;
🔸 not saved window close button doesn't work (Assembly);
🔸 can't attach anything small into side slots of Adapter 1.2-0.55;
🔸 when changing fuel tank attachments and it is a root part, attachment positions become broken;
🔸 removed launch button from the UI in the rocket assembly mod;
🔸 "in", "out" buttons and fuel amount slider doesn't update and change state in docking port window.
Known issues:
🔸 game crashes when opening any mod preview and then trying to continue the game (Unity issue, can't do much about it for now)