Kerbal Space Program 2 News

Last month, GTA 6 publishers Take-Two Interactive announced plans to "rationalize" their "pipeline" by laying off five per cent of their workforce - around 580 people - and cancelling various games. As part of that, they're reportedly now doing away with 70 positions at their Seattle offices - Seattle being the home of the Take-Two-owned Intercept Games, the current developers of space sim Kerbal Space Program 2.

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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!

[hr][/hr]Keep up with all things Kerbal Space Program 🚀 KSP Forums KSP Website Facebook Twitter Instagram Intercept Games Discord KSP YouTube

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:

[h3]Can you describe an eclipse and why it is a special event?[/h3]
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

[h3]What should people expect to see when viewing the eclipse?[/h3]
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

[h3]What happens to the Sun's light during an eclipse?[/h3]
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.

[h3]How does that inform your work with the Visualizations team at NASA?[/h3]
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.

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

[h3]Directional Lighting[/h3]
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.


[h3]Intersection of Circles[/h3]
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.
[h3]C₁: x² + y² = r₁²
C₂: (x - d)² + y² = r₂²[/h3]

Then, isolate y² in each equation and combine both equations like so:
[h3]y² = r₁² - d₁²
y² = r₂² - (d₁ - d)²
r₁² - d₁² = r₂² - (d₁ - d)²[/h3]

Finally, we can solve for d₁ and d₂ :
[h3]d₁ = (r₁² - r₂² + d²) / 2d
d₂ = d - d₁[/h3]

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:
[h3]Area of a triangle = (1/2)r² sin⁡θ
Area of a sector = (1/2)r² θ

Area of segment = ((1/2)r² θ) - ((1/2)r² sin⁡θ) = (r² / 2) * (θ - sin⁡θ)

A1 = (( r₁² ) / 2) * (θ₁ - sin⁡θ₁)
A2 = ((r₂²) / 2) * (θ₂ - sin⁡θ₂)

Total Area = A1 + A2[/h3]



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.



[h3]Lens Flare Occlusion[/h3]
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!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
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