Hello Kerbonauts!
While last week's AMA was great, it looks like I forgot to check my staging when lining up the questions - many have pointed out that a lot of Discord queries got answered, but questions submitted through Steam and the KSP Forums were neglected. I'll try to be more conscious of that when the next AMA rolls around, but in an effort to right a past injustice, I'll answer a few of the questions that got missed right now! Here we go:
First, from Filip Hudak, on the forums: When we'll see other exotic fuel types like metallic hydrogen? Will they be added alongside some big update like colonies or will they be added before?
- We will be bringing in new engine and fuel types across multiple updates, generally as they become instrumental to the progression. I suspect nuclear pulse will be next up, as it opens up the interplanetary progression quite nicely and is a good supplement to colony building. Chris Adderley has also cooked up a few new methalox engines that I think will be popping up sooner rather than later.
From Moons, on the forums: Adjustable UI/UX, legacy UI, scaling, modularity.
- This is a good example of an area that's being developed iteratively. I think the first goal is to give players the ability to rescale the flight HUD, but making it modular and giving both players and modders more control over how things look is a key priority for the UX/UI team.
From walkingwiki666, on Steam: Will the game's price increase as new features are added?
- The game's price will certainly increase when 1.0 arrives, though if you purchased the game during Early Access, you'll get all Early Access updates and the 1.0 update for free. After 1.0, we expect to continue providing free updates to the game, just like KSP1 did.
From MARL_MK1, on the forums: It is cool that we can press 'F2' and take HUD-less screenshots, but given that it's the most basic way of taking screenshots, and that many of us players enjoy taking the best pictures possible of our crafts: Does KSP2 plan to implement a fully fleshed C?
- I need to do a better job of evangelizing our capture camera controls! If you hit V, you can cycle through camera modes. When you're in Capture Mode, the numpad offers a bunch of new camera controls that you can combine to do smooth, swoopy pans, dollies, zooms, etc. You can combine these with paused time warp to do some pretty fancy stuff. Here are those controls:
- Zoom in: Keypad +
- Zoom out: Keypad -
- Roll left: Keypad 7
- Roll right: Keypad 9
- Orbit up: Keypad 8
- Orbit down: Keypad 5
- Orbit left: Keypad 4
- Orbit right: Keypad 6
- Pan up: Keypad 2 (or up arrow)
- Pan down: Keypad 0 (or down arrow)
- Pan left: Keypad 1 (or left arrow)
- Pan right: Keypad 3 (or right arrow)
- Mouse toggle: Backslash
- Speed up camera movement: Keypad *
- Slow down camera movement: Keypad /
From alphaprior, on the forums: Will it be possible to alter the surface on the planets? Like dig a pit or flatten an area for a colony?
- There are no current plans to do this - as you can imagine, it has some brain-bending multiplayer implications, especially when time warp gets involved. But it would be incredibly cool and I'm not aware of any specific technical blockers. It's certainly come up in conversations with Mortoc, our senior graphics engineer. I mean, we have a game with nuclear pulse engines...the fact that you can't make craters with them feels like a missed opportunity. So yeah, we'll keep talking about this.
Thanks for your questions!
Onto business. We have knocked out a few more bugs for Patch Two, including that pesky issue where vehicles with more than 8 parts in a radial symmetry set were loading into the floor. We've just about wrapped up the cherry picking process and can say with confidence that it'll be out sometime in the next two weeks. We'll post an exact date for Patch Two as soon as we know it.
As we continue stabilizing and improving performance, we're also making progress on re-entry heating, new parts, and Science Mode. And just to highlight that other, bigger systems are always being worked on in parallel, here's some pictures of our QA team goofing off in multiplayer:
Yes, collision is working:
Last week's Duna-focused Weekly Challenge yielded some incredible creations! If you're in the mood to see highlights, the most-upvoted posts on both the ksp2_challenges and ksp2_screenshots Discord channels are now archived in the ksp2_bestof channel. There, you'll see stuff like this:
Those hydrogen tanks shine up real nice!
Finally, an apology: we've had some minor technical difficulties getting the next Weekly Challenge put together, but we hope to be bale to get something posted over the weekend. We regret the delay.
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