A fine May afternoon to you, fellow Kerbonauts!
I'll start with a bit of good news: the v0.1.3.0 update will be dropping in June. We'll announce an exact target date when we're a little closer to the day. We've already seen a few big bugs go down (you can throw a fairing away now in the VAB without endlessly redeploying its editor, for example), but I'm going to hold off on itemizing other fixes until they're confirmed zapped by QA. Regardless, we're feeling good about our progress in all areas and are confident that the next update will provide good performance, stability, and gameplay improvements.
In the meantime, our design and content teams continue to bring new parts to life. One thing they're working on now: grid fins! There were designed by Chris Adderley and brought to life by Alexander Martin. Chris would like me to point out that the fin on the right is shown upside-down so that you can see the beautiful serration detail:
Our tech artist Jon Cioletti (with the help of graphics gurus Christ Mortonson and Phil Fortier) has pulled off the impressive feat of improving both polish and performance by overhauling the solar lens flare occlusion system. Lens flare occlusion (the scaling/disappearance of the sun's lens flare when passing behind objects) no longer uses raycasts or colliders - now we're literally counting pixels on the sun itself. The result: no more sun peeking through terrains or oceans, no more weird flare behavior behind vehicle parts, and the sun now shines correctly through visors, trusses, parachutes, and windows! Check it out:
Disclaimer: This is a compressed GIF version for Steam due to file size constraints. Check out the full video res version here.
We've also been building some lovely Science collection parts, which are meant to provide interesting, meaningful payloads for research missions. This is one of our new radial science collection parts (designed by Chris Adderley, built by Alexander Martin, and animated by Paul Zimmer):
In community highlight news, we've received your capybaras and have found them various cute, hilarious, and unsettling. For more capybara shenanigans, check out this week's roundup. This week's challenge is to land on Moho!
See you all next week and happy flying!
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