• Fixed: Moving stages around in the extended staging stack is difficult
  
• Fixed: Duplicated wheels, wings, and decouplers connected to physicsless parts will occasionally fall off or cause the craft to disassemble when launching the vessel
  
• Fixed: Loading a craft file with parts surface-attached to other surface attached parts causes parts to show on the floor of the vehicle assembly building
  
• Fixed: Duplicating a stack in the VAB that includes a decoupler and an engine causes errors when launching the vessel

• Updated parachute safety and destruction algorithms so that parachutes will not deploy in situations where they will immediately break
  
• Adjusted parachute default deploy pressures from 0.01 to 0.04 atm so they will deploy after reentry regimes
  
• Revised parachute drag numbers to provide a more consistent experience
  
• Fixed: Parachutes that are staged via the staging stack do not appear as staged in the Part Manager
  
• Maneuvers can now be created in the map even if a vessel shows 0 delta-V available
  
• Fixed: Using the Surface Teleport cheat to move a craft with landing legs extended can cause orbit lines to disappear
  
• Fixed: If a vessel is decoupled on the ground, launching will cause a permanent 'Landed' state, causing orbit lines to not be drawn
  
• Fixed: Fairings contacting their base plate after being jettisoned causes a permanant 'Landed' state, causing orbit lines to not be drawn
  
• Fixed: Using the Teleport to Rendezvous cheat from ground to orbit will cause a permanent 'Landed' state, causing orbit lines to not be drawn
  
• Fixed: Craft with landing legs, wheels or landing gear regularly clip into the terrain after timewarping
  
• Fixed: Fairings disable parachutes placed inside or near them, even after fairings are ejected
  
• Fixed: Fairings and cargo bays sometimes do not detect encapsulated parts correctly
  
• Fixed: If a vessel is recovered during the smoke sequence, the next vessel sent to the launchpad will auto-launch

• Fixed: Smoke sequence VFX and SFX are missing after reverting to launch

• Updated game credits
  
• Removed the Private Division Launcher

• Revised Launch A Rocket and Out of Atmosphere missions to require players to land or splash their vessels for successful completion
  
• Fixed: The tutorial vessel overheats during the Atmospheric Reentry tutorial

• Added aditional autosave points during Flight gameplay

• Added a dedicated Recover Vessel button in the flight HUD
  
• Added notifications for when a player attempts blocked actions during timewarp or paused states
  
• Added UI signpost when timewarping
  
• Added notifications for when a parachute breaks in flight
  
• Reduced the duration of the pre-launch countdown sequence

If you'd like to provide feedback about this build:
Suggest a Change on the KSP Forums

Bug reports should be shared to:
Dedicated Bug Reports on the KSP Subforum

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!

---

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Hey! I’m Jon Cioletti, the Senior Technical Artist focused on lighting and VFX here at Intercept
Games! In celebration of the upcoming total solar eclipse, today we are looking at some of the
lighting tech around eclipses in KSP2 - but first we have to talk about eclipses in REAL life!

To help with that, we reached out to one of our friends over at NASA: Senior Visualization Designer AJ Christensen. AJ works at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS), where he develops visualization techniques and designs data-driven imagery for scientific analysis and public outreach. AJ was kind enough to take some time out of his busy day to answer a few questions to kick this Dev Diary off right:

There are a lot of objects in space that pass between the Earth and the Sun at various times. We usually call it a “transit” when something that appears much smaller than the disk of the Sun passes in front of it, like an asteroid, or the International Space Station, or Venus.


Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

But through a crazy coincidence of physical size and distance from Earth, the apparent size of the disk of the Moon in the sky is almost exactly the same as the apparent size of the disk of the Sun in the sky, and so when the Moon transits in front of the Sun, we call it an eclipse because it blocks out a significant part of the Sun’s light.

The Moon actually orbits around Earth approximately every 27 days, so you might think we would see an eclipse every 27 days, but because of the tilt of that orbit, the Moon is usually not lined up with the Earth and Sun. For this reason, a lot of orbits result in no eclipse, or only a partial eclipse.

The total eclipse happening on April 8th is a rare event where the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun are all in a straight line, and the United States will be on the “day side” of the planet, meaning we get to experience the Sun being completely blocked out by the Moon for a few minutes in any given location along the path of totality.


Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

Anyone within the contiguous United States will be able to see the eclipse in some way on April 8th. If you are outside the path of totality, you will have several hours to witness a partial eclipse in the middle of the day. This means that the Sun will have a bit of a crescent shape, but it will not completely block the Sun. This is a fun time to put on approved solar eclipse viewing protective glasses and look at the shape of the sun, and to make pinhole projectors out of colanders or crisscrossed fingers to see lots of little crescent shadows on the ground.

If you are inside the path of totality, which is about 100 miles wide and travels from Texas to Maine, you will see that partial eclipse for several hours, but right in the middle will be 3-4 minutes of totality when the bright disk of the Sun called the “photosphere” is completely blocked. During totality, the temperature will drop, crickets may start chirping, and you will see sunset colors in the sky in 360-degrees all around you.


Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

If you are able, it is definitely worth trying to get inside the path of totality. One place of many that you can find more information to plan a trip is this visualization my colleagues made:

Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

In the words of “Mr. Eclipse” Fred Espenak, a retired NASA astrophysicist, “there are no special eclipse rays.” The Sun continues to be what it always is – an extremely bright object in the sky that hurts to look at. This is why NASA insists that anyone viewing the eclipse should wear approved eclipse-viewing lenses, because even during a partial eclipse, you are still looking directly at the Sun. (Note, cameras can also be damaged if they look directly at the sun without a solar filter.)

However, in the last seconds before totality, there are some dazzling effects we can see. The first to occur is called the “Diamond Ring Effect”. This is where some of the sun’s light wraps around the horizon of the moon like a ring, and a sliver of light still at the edge creates a huge amount of glare like a diamond.

Credit: NASA/Carla Thomas

The next effect we call “Baily’s Beads” which are visible for only a moment – these are a line of bright spots of light that poke through the valleys on the edge of the Moon.

Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani

And finally, once the Sun is completely covered by the moon, we get to see magic of the Solar corona, long tendrils of illuminated plasma in the Sun’s atmosphere. The corona is always there in the sky, but it is usually completely covered up by glare from the disk of the Sun, which is about 1 million times brighter than the corona. For these 3 or 4 minutes of totality, we recommend taking off your eclipse glasses and soaking in the corona with your bare eyes.

Credit: Miloslav Druckmüller, Peter Aniol, Shadia Habbal/NASA Goddard, Joy Ng

Once totality ends, Baily’s Beads and the Diamond Ring will appear again and we recommend putting your eclipse glasses back on to enjoy the rest of the partial eclipse.

My team is called the Scientific Visualization Studio, and we use both observed and computed data to make images and videos that explain science research. We have been working closely with scientists and communicators across NASA to create computer graphics imagery to help explain what the April 8th eclipse will look like on the Earth’s surface and in the sky, the surprising geometry of the Earth-Moon-Sun system, and more.

We even recently published a game aimed toward younger audiences on NASA’s SpacePlace website called “Snap It!” that gets into what transits are and how eclipses are a special kind of transit. You can find it here.

And, of course, you can view thousands of visualizations about the eclipse and other science topics at our website.

---

Now that we've got a good idea of what happens during eclipses in real life, let's jump into the game!

To try and simulate the lighting we see in our solar system we use a variety of systems, but for the eclipse we’ll be focusing on our direct lighting solution with the star of the solar system: Kerbol. While a star technically emits light in all directions, in our game we only really need to care about the star’s light that reaches our player. To handle this, we use a Directional Light which, by definition, is located infinitely far away and emits in one direction only.



This works great for lighting our worlds with an intense light from a single distant source like a star. This directional light is also responsible for the direction that all shadows are cast in game.

To make this directional light behave more like an actual star, we attenuate its intensity based on distance and occlusion. Distance is the easier of the two. If the player flies their Kerbals way out towards Eeloo they’ll noticed their vessel gets much dimmer. Looking back at Kerbol they can see it shrinking in the skybox as well. To manage this, in the lighting code we attenuate the light’s intensity based on the Inverse Square Law which states that “the intensity of the radiation is inversely proportional to the square of the distance”. The formula looks a little something like this: 1 /x ² . Things like artist adjustable overrides and camera auto-exposure play into the lighting too, but in general throughout the solar system, the further you get from the star, the dimmer it gets.

For smaller objects like terrain, buildings, and parts, we use shadows to show light being occluded. But for something as huge as a celestial body we track how much they block our Kerbals from the star itself to attenuate the light intensity appropriately. As an example, we’ll use a solar eclipse with Kerbol and the Mun.


When you think about it in a flat 2D space, this is just two circles intersecting each other. If that’s the case then we can solve for the area of overlap to determine how occluded Kerbol is. The diagrams and formulas below show more of the math being done behind the scenes:

Our lighting system holds a reference to the current SOI celestial body, that body’s star and any neighboring bodies. All of these bodies are projected into a normalized sphere around the player where the system checks if any bodies are going to intersect. We can quickly verify this by checking if the sum of the body’s radii are greater than or equal to the distance between them. Once we pass this check, the intersection code starts and we begin solving for the amount of overlap to determine the percentage a body is blocked.



First step is to solve for the distance each circle is from the center of the intersection. To do this we use the equation of a circle and populate it with the values we know.

Then, isolate y² in each equation and combine both equations like so:

Finally, we can solve for d₁ and d₂ :

After that we can begin solving for the angle of the sector formed when tracing the radii of our celestial body to the intersection points:



With our new θ₁ and θ₂ in radians, we can solve for the area of each body’s overlapping segment A₁ and A₂. The following formula is derived by subtracting the area of the triangle from the area of the sector formed by this angle:



And there you have it, the area of overlap for the celestial body. This can then be used to determine the percentage of visibility the further body has by subtracting the occluded area from the total projected circle area and with that number we can scale the intensity of the light emitted by that source body. In our case for the eclipse that will dim the Kerbol’s intensity as the Mun passes over.



The final piece of the puzzle here is the lens flare of the star changing to show that it has been occluded by the Mun. The same visible percentage value is passed through to the lens flare system where it attenuates the scale of the flare to match the reduction of directional lighting in the environment. Unfortunately, this doesn’t capture the details of a total solar eclipse though.



We have plans to improve the look of eclipses and celestial body occlusion beyond attenuation and add more noticeable “flair” to a total eclipse like Kerbol’s corona peeking out from behind the Mun!

We’ll be keeping a close eye on the next total solar eclipse as reference and inspiration! And, if you're nearby and able to, we hope that you join us on April 8th in safely viewing this awesome event right above our heads.

Thanks to AJ and everyone over at NASA for contributing to this Dev Diary - and thanks to you for reading!

Cioletti

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This weekend marks one whole year since the Early Access launch of KSP2. How is it that a year can fly past in a heartbeat while also containing so much stuff?

In that time, our team has released a total of 11 updates and knocked out more than 2441 bugs. We’ve brought new physics systems online (re-entry heating, more rigid rockets) and we’ve added new features (Exploration Mode, Science collection, and Missions). As good as it’s felt to work through our feature list, the most satisfying part of the release process has always been the "day-after basking," where we take in all the unexpected ways the community is taking advantage of new gameplay possibilities. This has only gotten more exciting since the arrival of the Science and Mission features - not only are your vehicles getting more ambitious, but the missions themselves are starting to get pretty elaborate. The ways you’re getting the U-Dunkit module into alien seas are emblematic - it’s quite an awkward part, and the vehicles that it’s attached to tend to be delightfully weird!


Shadowzone does a Laythe dunk (full disclosure, he discovered a bug on this journey, but I think he still had fun)


Shadowzone is dunk-drunk, and now seeks out puddles across the Kerbolar System!


Audaylon with a rare double-dunker with fore and aft Dunk-its!


GalaxDragon aka Yuri has managed to get their U-Dunkit nowhere near any liquid at all.


SciVirus has used the part in an unexpected but delightful way.

We're looking forward to the new possibilities that will be opening up to players in the coming year, especially with the arrival of colonies! We’re making good progress in that area right now - why, here’s a stately little orbital test colony over Duna (it looks extremely cool with all the modules rotating):


Thanks for continuing to share your creations with us, and thanks for helping us to make KSP2 even better in 2024!

Kerbonauts!

So you want to go to space...have you tried rockets?

Introducing animated tutorial Space is the Place! Found in-game, this and other tutorials aim to improve the onboarding experience for new and returning players, while learning about various space concepts. They are the introduction to game concepts, after which players experience interactive tutorials to further learn the concepts shown.

This tutorial explores the concept of rockets - from launching to landing. Be sure to check your staging!

Check out the animated tutorial below!

---

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• Fixed: Shielded docking ports cannot be undocked after a reload
  
• Fixed: Shielded docking ports can dock when closed
  
• Fixed: Orbital drift compensation did not take axial tilt into account consistently, leading to additional drift near Celestial Bodies with axial tilt
  
• Fixed: Orbital drift compensation decreases in quality over time
  
• Fixed: Vessel collision with water often only destroys the first part
  
• Fixed: Heat shield automated fairings cause aerodynamic occlusion to parts near them
  
• Fixed: Decouplers require two clicks to stage
  
• Fixed: Vessel becomes active and the scene is switched automatically to flight view of the vessel
  
• Fixed: Jet engines cannot be deactivated until throttled down to zero
  
• Fixed: LT-5 "Bandioot" landing legs collapse to minimum length when any weight is applied
  
• Fixed: Surface teleport tool doesn't work in non-English languages
  
• Fixed: Surface teleport tool shows incorrect maximum altitude values for some celestial bodies
  
• Fixed: Vessel and KSC icons on the map are too large, particularly when closer to the camera
  
• Added new color theme to both A and B Intersect nodes on the Map
  
• Adjusted colors and iconography associated with Intersect Nodes on the Map
  
• Fixed: Switching to Mission Control when paused in flight hangs the game
  
• Fixed: Flight Report does not appear when crashing a vessel if the previously launched vessel had been recovered
  
• Added a delay before showing the Flight Report after a vessel crashes
  
• Fixed: Velocity readout in the Flight HUD only shows 4 significant figures

• Fixed: Several memory leaks when launching or loading vessels

• Fixed: Burn Timer window does not show staging events after loading a save with an active maneuver
  
• Fixed: Vessels lose functionality if loading a save that was made outside of flight mode in certain situations
  
• Fixed: Reverting to VAB with multiple vessels on the runway causes one of them to become unusable

• Reduced atmospheric shock heating in the upper 45% of most atmospheres significantly
  
• Increased heat transport away from parts in the top 20% of most atmospheres
  
• Increased stack decoupler and separator thermal masses by up to 3x
  
• Increased unshielded docking port thermal masses by 1.5x, increased temperature tolerance to 800K
  
• Increased thermal mass of light procedural wings, stabilizers and control surfaces by 1.5x
  
• Increased thermal mass of medium procedural wings, stabilizers and control surfaces by 1.75x, increased temperature tolerance to 1350K
  
• Increased thermal mass of spaceplane procedural wings, stabilizers and control surfaces by 1.2x
  
• Fixed: Solar panels occlusion is not calculated correctly near and past Jool
  
• Improved: RSCM-01 "Sample Grabber" arm incorrectly deploys in many situations
  
• Fixed: Surface attached lights don't function when first launching a vessel
  
• Fixed: Crater Crusher stock vessel has its solar panels incorrectly oriented

• Fixed: Game crashes when moving an assembly in the VAB with a nose cone as the anchor part and any non-single symmetry mode
  
• Fixed: Stack Separators placed below a vessel root part do not separate correctly causing destruction of the vessel
  
• Fixed: Clicking on the Orthographic Cube while holding a part or vessel deletes it while in the VAB
  
• Fixed: An exception is thrown when changing the Launch Assembly in the VAB, affecting the functionality of the Delta-V tools
  
• Fixed: Loading a vessel in VAB shows magenta cubes for a few seconds

• Fixed: Black dots show on Jool when observing the planet from the surface
  
• Fixed: Galaxy skybox does not rotate in some situations
  
• Fixed: Stars are too dim when orbiting some celestial bodies
  
• Fixed: Lighting on vessels orbiting Kerbol at a semi-major axis of >=23,000,000,000 flickers

• Fixed: Running a surface survey when planting a flag results in the Kerbal becoming uncontrollable
  
• Fixed: Running a Crew Observation from the PAM on an EVA Kerbal does not show any animation
  
• Added new Kerbal Variety assets from the Exploration release to KSC Kerbals
  
• Fixed: Kerbal Rocket Pin haircut does not receive correct hair colors

• Adjusted reentry VFX trigger points to more closely correlate with start of reentry heating
  
• Fixed: Heat shields do not show heat glow during reentry
  
• Fixed: Procedural wings do not show heat glow during reentry

• Fixed: Numerous errors in mission text
  
• Added a waypoint to guide the player as part of the "Tertiary Dibs: Platinum" mission.
  
• Fixed: An orange arrow/marker persists on the map during the tutorial "Establishing an Orbit"
  
• Fixed: Mission debrief text is repeated in "Minmus Monument" mission

• Fixed: Missing localization of some terms in the Mission control screen
  
• Fixed: Missing spaces in some languages in several sections of the Part Info window in the VAB
  
• Fixed: Incorrect localization for Research Reports collected around Dres
  
• Fixed: Incorrect localization for Research Reports collected around Jool

• Fixed: Using the Teleport tool with the maximum AP selected teleports the vessel slightly outside the target Celestial Body
  
• Fixed: Cheats menu can become locked into a box on the screen and cannot be moved outside its boundaries
  
• Fixed: Time Warp controls are still available when exiting to the Main Menu from within a gameplay session
  
• Fixed: Part poses for some main menu animations are incorrect

• Changed the behavior of experiments that take time: they will no longer pause when leaving a valid research location and will instead enter a suspended state until you return to the original region, where they will restart without player input
  
• Fixed: Experiment crew requirements depend on the vessel's crew intead of the part's crew
  
• Fixed: Orbital Surveys do not work in Low or High Kerbol orbit
  
• Fixed: Science action button flashes for already-completed experiments
  
• Fixed: Using the Transmit All button in the Research Inventory re-transmits already completed experiments
  
• Fixed: Mission notifications appear in Sandbox mode

If you'd like to provide feedback about this build, there are many different ways to do so:
Submit Feedback through the Game Launcher
Suggest a Change on the KSP Forums
Join us on Discord to discuss potential changes

Bug reports should be shared to either:
Private Division Customer Support
Dedicated Bug Reports on the KSP Subforum

Greetings! I'm Ness, the Art Director here at Intercept Games - let's talk about KSP2's User Interface, the most meta of all game art disciplines!

UI must surface moment-to-moment information and actions to players in either text or clever visual shorthand. When making a simulation game like KSP, an even greater burden of information is placed on the UI, since we need to supply players with a mountain of information and choices without overwhelming either the player or their screen’s real estate. It’s a fascinating and sometimes frustrating balance to strike; and I am consistently impressed by our UI/UX team’s ability to analyze abstract, un-implemented features and translate them into visuals. Jordan and Colton from our UI/UX team at Intercept work tirelessly to make rocket science digestible and slick-looking!

Before we dive into future plans for KSP2’s UI, I’d like to first take a quick look at KSP1’s. Its UI went through several distinct stages over the course of KSP1’s history, the most radical changes happening early in development. One thing that I love about videogame UI is that on top of all the information it must convey, its visual styling can suggest subtle narrative and worldbuilding—something that KSP1 has absolutely utilized and that we will continue to evolve in KSP2.

Some very early unreleased examples of KSP1 0.2’s UI can be found on HarvesteR’s dev blog. We can see a mix of fonts, both handwritten and geometric sans serif, as well as a barebones parts catalogue. The mix of fonts here is the most interesting detail to me; the handwritten altitude and speed readouts suggests a theme of "DIY" that applied to both the Kerbals in the game and the developers making the game.



A later iteration of the UI around KSP1 0.3 introduces the familiar grey that stuck around for the rest of development, as well as a precariously-stacked flight heads up display. This cobbled-together “junkyard” readout was an evolution of the Kerbal narrative of a DIY space program using salvaged parts.



By the time KSP1 0.7.3’s public release rolled around, the staging stack had moved to the left side of the screen, we had a flight cluster, and Kerbal live-feed portraits all carefully spaced around the edges and wrapped in that grey pseudo-metal that we saw back in 0.3. Gone was the junkyard aesthetic, and the skeuomorphic gauges were carefully lined up.

Credit: Whirligig Girl

And finally, a shot of KSP1's UI as of 1.0.

We’re all familiar with the symbiotic effect that mods had on KSP1, and I believe that by keeping the UI simple and grey, it allowed modders with limited artistic ability to easily match the look of the canonical UI and maintain a level of visual consistency which ultimately cuts down on cognitive load and increases immersion. This is absolutely something we on the art team are aware of in KSP2, and when it comes time to roll out additional modding tools the UI team will also share our internal style guide for modders interested in mimicking KSP2’s UI.

Now onto what I think most of you all are here for; what’s in store for the future of KSP2’s UI now that For Science! is out the door? In the weeks since release, we’ve enjoyed following along as new and returning KSP2 players have checked out the missions, discovered points of interest, and put all of our flight systems through their paces. As thrilling and satisfying as it’s been to see all of the impressive feats you’ve achieved since the For Science! update, we’re also been watching and documenting your reactions to the user experience and the user interface in particular.

We’re excited to see that many elements of our UI have facilitated a smoother first-time user experience, but with your help we’ve also identified several areas of confusion that we are actively tracking. These areas include:

• Fonts can be hard to read for a variety of reasons (size, scaling, color, contrast, etc.).
  
• The maneuver gizmo can be difficult to interact with, and precision maneuvers are especially difficult.
  
• Trajectory tag markers can be difficult to differentiate or identify.
  
• Trajectory tag stems can get tangled with one another in ways that cause significant visual confusion.
  
• SOI transit "bullseye" indicators are too bright, too big, and too prominent relative to other map elements (this is a personal bugbear of mine).
  
• Rearranging the staging stack order when selecting the bottom-most stage is difficult.
  
• The Part Manager presents several usability issues including but not limited to: observing many parts at once, using the Resource Manager as a separate app to specifically track fuel on a per-part basis feels awkward, associating a viewed part in the manager with the actual part on the ship.
  
• We are not adequately communicating that "Revert to VAB" causes a loss of recent progress, and there are situations when reversion should not be accessible at all.
  
• It is not obviously clear, especially to new players, when a vehicle is recoverable.
  
• The audio-only countdown on launch presents both accessibility and legibility problems.
  
• When in any time warp state other than 1x, the UI does not adequately communicate the state change. The tendency to interpret an under-warp failed control input as a bug has caught out quite a few members of our own team, and is likely responsible for quite a few bug reports.
  
• Visual styling for some UI elements is not completely unified.
  
• It would be very handy to be able to see mission requirements in the VAB while constructing a vehicle.

KSP2 in early access is delivering the kind of active feedback loop we were hoping to see, and we’ve now got a nice collection of feedback items to help guide our work priorities. We’re excited to continue improving on the UI. In the meantime, we’ve been working away on a few UI improvements of our own! In the upcoming v0.2.1.0 update you’ll not only see us begin to work through the 2024 bug list, but you’ll also see the following changes:


We’ve adjusted the iconography and visuals of intersect nodes to make them easier to interpret (and hopefully easier to learn). We’ve also adjusted the colors of the planned trajectory line to further differentiate from your current trajectory, and shifted the colors on intercept nodes to make it more clear what relation your craft has to celestial bodies.

Time and space are weird, but through these and future trajectory improvements we’re working on, we hope to make parsing orbital mechanics more approachable!


Aaaaaalso as a sneak peek for something that’s coming beyond the v0.2.1.0 update, Jordan has been diligently combing through and adjusting KSP2’s UI in a giant unification pass in order to align some of our disparate visuals. The shot below represents the first wave of style unification on the highest traffic areas of the game:


I'm looking forward to sharing more UI improvements with you all in the future!

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[h5]Share Your Creations![/h5]

We've got an exciting announcement! We're working on a new video for KSP2 and we want YOU to share your favorite creations with us for inclusion in the video. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rocket, a plane, a rover, a boat, a giant mechanical turkey, or whatever your heart desires—if you love it and you’re proud of it we want to see it! If we end up using your submission, you’ll be credited and have eternal bragging rights.

If you’d like to submit, send an image of your creation along with a craft file (.json) to crafts@interceptgames.com. Please also include your preferred name so we can credit you (can be real name or username). A bit of fine print here: by submitting your creation, you’re agreeing to let us use the craft file in any and all future marketing materials. Thanks!

We’ll release more details as the project moves forward. We’re excited to take your vehicles out for a spin!

Hello Kerbonauts, happy new year!

We had a lot riding on the For Science! update that we released two weeks ago - it's been a long first year of Early Access, filled with the arduous and mostly unglamorous pursuit of bugs, stability improvements, and performance gains. This update, the first of our major roadmap updates, had to achieve some big new goals for KSP2:

• Round out the core game loop with re-entry heating and buoyancy
  
• Introduce a whole new progression system via the R&D Center and Mission Control
  
• Introduce Science collection, Science parts, and dozens of new points of interest
  
• Continue to deliver quality of life improvements (like banishing wobbly rockets) and performance improvements

Also: there are boat docks now! In a nutshell, the additional of Exploration Mode transformed KSP2 from a sandbox experience into a proper long-form game.

With working on something with many moving parts, there's always a little trepidation when we release a new build to the public - especially when there are so many new systems in play. We do our best to test every possible scenario, but there's always a chance that something terrifying will rear its head once we’ve got thousands of people playing the game. It was with this fear lurking in the backs of our heads that we sat together in our own mission control room and waited for confirmation that For Science! had been released into the world.

We nervously watched the first review videos appear of YouTube, and were relieved to discover that veteran players like Carnasa and Matt Lowne were excited about what they found in the new update. We cycled between Everyday Astronaut, EJ_SA, and Giantwaffle, discovering to our delight that all three were not only having fun, but were having trouble putting the game down! By the time we did our own livestream that evening, it was clear that we'd succeeded in creating a more stable and realistic universe and gave players compelling goals to pursue within that universe. Our stream ran over an hour longer than planned because we too had trouble putting it down. That's a story we're hearing a lot - you sit down to play this game for an hour, and before you know it the sun's coming up.

Over the last couple of weeks, a clear picture has emerged - there are still bugs, as well as some big opportunities to improve the player experience - but for the most part, those rough edges have not gotten in the way of some very ambitious exploratory missions. I’ll talk more about those bugs in a bit, but first I’d like to highlight some of this update’s biggest wins:

• The music. Yes, you all love Howard Mostrom. We’re going to need a bigger inbox for all his fan mail.
  
• The tutorials and first-time user experience have paved the way for a new group of first-time Kerbal players. We’re not only seeing lots of you get to space, we’re also seeing a lot more players doing interplanetary missions. In many ways, the original justification for KSP2’s existence was to find a way to welcome more new players to Kerbal, and we’re very excited to see that this work has begun to bear fruit. We knew that bringing rocket science to the masses wasn’t going to be easy, and there’s still a lot more work to do in this area...but we’re making progress!
  
• Folks are enjoying the missions! We’re excited to continue adding new missions to the game via upcoming updates, and we’d love to hear your suggestions for compelling new exploration goals.
  
• In general, we’re beginning to see the flourishing of player creativity that we knew would take place once the most critical performance and usability issues had been ironed out. It’s been a pleasure to visit the KSP Subreddit and our #bestof channel on Discord and bask in the awesomeness. People are making magnificent things, and it feels nice to see all that imagination unleashed.

Look at this stuff!

Courtesy of Aravir

Courtesy of Flypig07UA

Courtesy of Dr. Seno

Courtesy of BioticKeen

Of course, a key benefit to our game being in Early Access is that we get detailed bug reports and feedback from a wide variety of players. And boy, did we get a big helping after releasing this update. Check out the spike we saw on our K.E.R.B. bug submissions at the end of December:


There are some annoying bugs and usability issues in the mix - some are new, some have been around for a while but have risen in prominence now that other more consequential problems have been addressed. Some areas of frustration include:

• Font scale and legibility
  
• The maneuver node interface
  
• Thermal system tuning, including the propensity of some parts to explode even when they’re shielded and the insufficiency of fairings to protect their contents)
  
• One-off stability issues (most of which can be corrected by reloading or restarting)

We are triaging and trying to reproduce issues related to things like parachutes failing to deploy, trajectories vanishing from the map view, and Delta-V accuracy (which given the dependency of maneuver plans on accurate Delta-V projection, can result in being blocked from planning a maneuver). We’ve also noted some user experience gaps, most notably the game’s failure to properly communicate to new players that "Revert to VAB" is different from "Return to VAB" - an oversight that has led some newcomers to lose their progress after completing a mission.

I’ll also take this moment to offer a new protip that I learned today after complaining to Chris Adderley about my spaceplane wings being destroyed on re-entry: while the heavier wings are more heat-resistant, the volume of every wing (and especially the wing’s thickness) affects its thermal mass. A thicker wing will be more resistant to destruction via heat! I’ll be trying out the "fat wings" approach tonight after work. Procedural wings sure are cool.

Anyway, back to bugs. If you’re one of the people who have come up against a truly blocking or fun-destroying issue, please do take the time to share that information with us via the KSP Forums. We’re seeing less of this after the For Science! update, but it’s still something we want to investigate aggressively when it’s encountered.

We’re already hard at work on the v0.2.1.0 incremental update to address as many of these issues as we can, and we’ll update you here as soon as we know the exact timing and contents of that update. In the meantime, thank you for continuing to share your bug reports and feedback - your detailed reporting continues to play a huge role in helping us to improve the game.

Another exciting new development: modders have started to produce some extremely cool augmentations for KSP2, including Orbital Survey, an alarm clock mod (already heading towards 2,000 downloads!), and there's even some planet modding underway! Our team is especially happy to see that the extensible tech tree file format created with future moddability in mind has paved the way for things like the new Tech Tree Manager mod.

The Orbital Survey mod

The 2.5x Kerbolar System mod

The next major roadmap update, which will bring colonies to the game, is now also in progress. In the meantime, the current plan is to sneak a few additional missions into the next incremental update, just to keep things fresh. Now that there are interesting things to do in the game, we’re very excited about all the ways that we can continue adding new layers to that experience in the coming year while knocking out the bugs that remain. 2024 is going to be a very exciting year for KSP2, both for the players and for us developers!

Nate

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Hello Kerbonauts!

With the imminent launch of the Vulcan Rocket, Creative Director Nate Simpson paid a visit to the experts over at United Launch Alliance (ULA) HQ to get their help in his own Vulcan attempt in KSP2.

You can join in on a limited time challenge to create your own Vulcan Rocket in KSP2 and complete an ambitious mission (the more ambitious, the better!) with the potential to win some exciting goodies.

Post your videos/images on X or Instagram, tag @ULAlaunch and @KerbalSpaceP, and use #KSPVulcanRocket. Tory Bruno, CEO at ULA, will pick out his favorite! You have until January 5!

Thank you to ULA and the Vulcan team!

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