Rooting for Juice

Good day, fellow Kerbonauts!

In last week's post, I communicated our intent to decrease the update cadence during Early Access to allow our team to devote a greater portion of their time moving toward 1.0 and a little less time prepping incremental public updates. Some have expressed concern that this change signified some dark portent. To ease some of your concerns, here are a few clarifications:

• Our team is fully funded, properly staffed, and completely focused on executing the full vision of KSP2. Our velocity is good and our morale is great. This is still a dream job, and we're still committed to making this game spectacular.
  
• We want to balance our desire to be Santa (literally the most fun part of my job) against our goal of delivering an excellent product. The update cadence we're looking at right now extends the previous cadence by two to three weeks - structurally, the change is not radical. I know the waiting is painful, especially when there are still game-breaking bugs. Hopefully, the fact that each update will contain more improvements due to that lower frequency helps to offset some of the frustration of waiting.
  
• This project has from the beginning been viewed as a long-tail endeavor requiring a long-term investment. We are not worried about keeping the lights on; and we will be delivering on all of the promised roadmap features over the course of the Early Access period.
  
• These development updates will continue to provide visibility into areas where gains are being made. These posts are by no means comprehensive, not least because many of the improvements we're seeing aren't necessarily photogenic. They are meant to give you a taste of what's to come.
  

For example, we have seen rescalable UI elements in action for the first time this week (with many thanks to our new engineer Ryan). We know this is a highly-anticipated improvement, especially for players with higher-resolution displays. The same below is a work in progress (yes, I see the app bar isn't scaling yet) - the final implementation is likely to index to preset sizes to avoid scaling artifacts. I'm certainly looking forward to this one:



Note: This is a work in progress!

Darrin House, our Director of QA, posted a really in-depth Dev Blog that I think does a great job of showing the behind-the-scenes reality of testing this game. It pairs well with a lot of recent discussion in the community about the role of QA in the development process, and it gives some insight into the unique challenges presented by KSP2. No shade on previous dev blogs, but this one raises the bar. I am perhaps saying how much I like pictures here. It has lots of pictures.

This week saw some unprecedented radness on the ksp2_screenshots Discord channel. Check out these masterpieces from Coriolis, Little Earl, memes1, and Schwing2727:


Finally, this week's challenge: fly a mission inspired by ESA's JUICE program. While we wait for the RIME antenna to get itself unstuck, let's send good vibes ESA's way by flying our own multi-moon probes to the satellites of Jool! Now's a great time to polish up your gravity-assist chops.

Have a lovely weekend!

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