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Devnote Tuesday: UI, more UI, and answers to frequently asked questions!


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<figure data-orig-width="480" data-orig-height="92" class="tmblr-full"><img data-orig-width="480" data-orig-height="92" src="http://40.media.tumblr.com/0ff9377afa68dc3ad3fe6844aaf1bd38/tumblr_inline_nvgieraQMk1rr2wit_540.jpg"/></figure><p>Hello everyone!</p><p>It’s been another week of UI work, but this week we’ve got a lot more to show for our efforts: Mike (Mu) has been hard at work implementing the KSPedia interface and backend, and has compiled a list of content to include in it which now measures over 100 items. .The contents for the KSPedia are now shown via a tree style controller which is much more usable than a flat list. Some minor changes to how the back end deals with screens associated with categories makes for cleaner code and easier maintenance.</p><p>Meanwhile, Felipe (HarvesteR) has been making a ton of progress, finishing up work on the orbit lines, map icons and orbital context menus, and the KSC panels and vessel markers, which are now all implemented and working. With those out of the way he’s moved his attention to the vessel recovery dialog.</p><p>Work on the staging user interface has also continued, with Jim (Romfarer) tackling more background focused tasks. The backend of the staging interface is now sending distinct calls to the user interface, whereas in the old where everything went into the same place. This has made the staging interface more stable and most of the odd visual staging bugs should be gone. </p><p>The amazing Dan (Danrosas) finished the designs for the prints that will be made for the office. Once it’s ready he’ll share some pictures on Twitter. All in all, three posters will decorate the wall of our remodeled office, but first they’ll to be printed and framed. Aside from the posters there will also be a giant Kerbal vinyl decorative piece. These will pretty much signify the end of the office remodeling (finally!).</p><p>We want to zoom in on the user interface update in general for a while too: when we started the overhaul we knew that it would be a tremendous amount of work: we tend to overlook a lot of the user interface when we’re just playing through the game, but once you start really taking stock of every single interface component in the project, you’ll find that it’s simply everywhere. </p><p>The new native Unity UI is really shining through all this. If we were porting to some other UI system, we would be having a very, very hard time. The fact that this overhaul is doable at all is very much a comment on how easy to use, flexible and powerful the native Unity UI system is. Felipe commented that he can’t wait to start creating new UI controls with it, and that what used to be the most dreaded part of the job is now looking like a fun, creative process.</p><p>Be that as it may, we are still looking at quite a mountain to climb with the overhaul. Progress is happening much more steadily now, but the amount of work still left to be done is enormous.</p><p>All that work that gets done is prepared and organized by the producers, and Max (Maxmaps) and Ted have been busy discussing features, handling dev kits, and setting up schedules that might drive some people insane, but will ultimately speed up the process of translating code and user interface discussions in the devnotes into an actual new update. As time progresses and Ted settles into his new role as Technical Producer, the teamwork between him and Max is improving exponentially. </p><p>At the moment Ted is mostly busy rearranging QA schedules to fit the updated plans we have for 1.1. Those are currently being finalized and we hope to be able to share more about it on Squadcast, or in next week’s devnotes, time permitting. Outside of that, we’ve frequently found him performing the usual producer-type tasks of e-mailing intently, looking thoughtfully out of windows and having meetings.</p><p>Joining the frantic pace are Andrea (Badie) and Kasper (KasperVld), who are currently reviewing the dozens of applications to join the Media Group. Watching YouTube videos may sound like an easy job, but giving a well-founded opinion on over 30 channels with different styles, and comparing them based on those descriptions can get very complicated very fast, not to mention time consuming! There are literally hundreds of videos to look at, and thousands of metrics to compare. </p><p>If you’ve been following KSPTV last week you may have caught the streams that Scott Manley, DasValdez, Jimorian, EJ_SA and Shimmy did from the B612 Foundation in San Fransisco and Twitchcon. The universe seems to have survived this enormous concentration of cool at the same time in the same place, but it must’ve been close to collapsing. We understand they’ve all had a great time there, and we hope that everyone else who was there has too.</p><p>If you’re visiting OpenESTEC this Sunday, you might unknowingly run into Kasper, who will be there to attend a few symposia and meet a few ESA staff. If you live in the Netherlands (or close by) and if you’re interested in spaceflight then this might just be something you’re interested in: lectures by astronauts, actual spacecraft and the research & technology centre of ESA will be open to the public. Check out the <b><a href="http://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESTEC/What_s_on_at_Sunday_s_ESTEC_Open_Day">schedule</a></b>, and <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/esa-estec-open-day-2015-registration-17495794392"><b>register</b></a>!</p><p>Finally, we really wanted to answer some of the discussions and questions that we’ve picked up from our forums and social media. So, here we go:</p><p>Jim on GUI click-through</p><blockquote><p><i>We are aware that the old user interface has click-through issues. The reason is mainly because we had 3 GUI systems running on top of each other (we talked about this in one of the previous devnotes). In addition, everything that involves cursor movement and hit detection outside GUI’s is handled with its own controller, actually a quite big number of controllers, all of them have to communicate with the user interface system and lock itself down whenever the mouse is over an element. <br/></i></p><p><i>Now that we’ve consolidated everything into the new Unity 5 GUI system we can accumulate all these checks into one line of code courtesy, which means that (by default) clicks don’t bleed through these elements into itself anymore.</i></p></blockquote><p>Felipe on save and craft compatibility</p><blockquote><p><i>Craft files from earlier versions do still work in 1.1. So far none of what we’ve done has caused them to break. Some redesigns might be needed to account for subtle differences in flight handling and such, caused by the move to the Unity5 physics, but there shouldn’t be any changes that would outright break backward compatibility.</i></p><p><i>The same goes for game saves. So far, I’ve been testing here with my old saves from 1.0 and before, and they keep on loading fine, so as far as we can tell, there’s nothing that would break those either. Of course, modded saves are quite another story. Perhaps even more so than with ‘regular’ updates, mods will almost certainly need to be updated to work with 1.1, so modded games might run into issues, at least until the mods in question are updated. </i></p></blockquote><p>Felipe on DirectX12</p><blockquote><p><i>DirectX12 support is not something we can support ourselves. It depends on Unity to support it, and from what I’ve read, DX12 support is still several months off. Not that KSP would make much use of its new features.</i></p></blockquote><p>Ted on beta testing the console ports</p><blockquote><p><i>I’ve read <a href="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/134807-PS4-Beta-testing"><b>a thread on our forums</b></a> that answered a question about our console QA process that I’m sure many of you had, and so it’s good to repeat it here. For our console QA process, Flying Tiger will be handle the primary QA process in-house, with Squad assisting with in-house QA as well.</i><br/></p></blockquote>

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Felipe commented that he can’t wait to start creating new UI controls with it
Maybe we could have a movable and sizable navball, much like how Enhanced Navball handles things? Looking good overall.

Any word on crawling the entire craft part tree on every resource request?

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Maybe we could have a movable and sizable navball, much like how Enhanced Navball handles things? Looking good overall.

Any word on crawling the entire craft part tree on every resource request?

Do you have a link to the topic? I'll see if we can squeeze it in for next week

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The amazing Dan (Danrosas) finished the designs for the prints that will be made for the office. Once it’s ready he’ll share some pictures on Twitter. All in all, three posters will decorate the wall of our remodeled office, but first they’ll to be printed and framed. Aside from the posters there will also be a giant Kerbal vinyl decorative piece. These will pretty much signify the end of the office remodeling (finally!).

That's a worry off my chest

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Do you have a link to the topic? I'll see if we can squeeze it in for next week
Have the devs look at the entire Part.RequestResource() chain. It's pretty hairy and I (and a bunch of other people) are pretty certain optimizing that would help with large craft since crawling over the entire craft part tree several times per Unity update looking for Resources instead of caching those parts containing usable Resources is wasteful. There have been a few mentions of it, not certain if anyone has ever posted it as a bug since it's pure optimization (not to mention all the other vagaries surrounding the KSP source code and discussing it here).
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Thanks for another great devnote; this update has grown into an epic project, but well worth it: the game code base will be a much more solid position, from which you guys can improve and extend it much more easily.

Felipe on save and craft compatibility: "The same goes for game saves. So far, I’ve been testing here with my old saves from 1.0 and before, and they keep on loading fine, so as far as we can tell, there’s nothing that would break those either. Of course, modded saves are quite another story."
Please check a 1.0 save with a craft that has captured / claw'd an asteroid. Because code to generate asteroids was rewritten, I have been expecting minor surface geometry differences between versions, that could result in "floating" or "buried" claw attachments.

---Edit: added---

Can somebody clarify for me, what is the scope of the work being done in 1.1 ... is it still just the Unity upgrade or is it more?

This is the most recent word I'm aware of, about: new content planned for v1.1.

Edited by basic.syntax
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Nice notes. Always good to see continued forward progress.

Congrats on getting your offices settled - it's a "must have" ---> a comfortable and inspiring working environment

I also support the idea of a scalable navball, and would greatly appreciate it as a stock feature.

And while we are all submitting xmas ideas... can you please fix the fuel cell cfg to make it draw fuel from its attached part and to be constrained by crossfeed? pretty please? Oh sorry - that's not a UI issue... forget it.

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Nice news,

it's great to see an overhaul in the communication too!

why limit it to the navball?

Now i want a fully customisable UI for each section: size, position, information displayed ...

here is some questions if you want to make a big FAQ: (or if someone can answer it now, or is there a FAQ somewhere?)

-what about displaying the Dv and TWR of the ship in stock with the new UI (KER-like)?

(on my side i could prefer you focus on other amazing stuff because KER is yet there and already do a great job)

-what about the docking mode? maybe a rover mode by default instead?

- Will a partool for U5 be availble as soon as the 1.1 will be?

-1.1, new antennae with it?

I wish you the best

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The amazing Dan (Danrosas) finished the designs for the prints that will be made for the office. Once it’s ready he’ll share some pictures on Twitter. All in all, three posters will decorate the wall of our remodeled office, but first they’ll to be printed and framed. Aside from the posters there will also be a giant Kerbal vinyl decorative piece.

And these bad boys'll be available for sale, right? For less than the price of a trip to Eeloo? At least the posters... pretty preeze?

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-what about displaying the Dv and TWR of the ship in stock with the new UI (KER-like)?

(on my side i could prefer you focus on other amazing stuff because KER is yet there and already do a great job)

This is the most recent info / "FAQ" for v1.1 that I'm aware of: new content planned for v1.1.

Squad had planned to display some dV info for v1.0, but the way they wanted to display it needed more work, and the feature was delayed. I don't see it on the v1.1 article linked above, but I feel certain that once the UI overhaul is done, we will eventually see Squad's method of giving us extra dV info. :)

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Maybe we could have a movable and sizable navball, much like how Enhanced Navball handles things? Looking good overall.

Any word on crawling the entire craft part tree on every resource request?

I am so up with that! Being able to slide or toggle that thing off to the side while setting down on a moon or whatever,,,Priceless

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Interesting there being 3 UI systems in use, I imagine KSP will perform a little better if this is simplified. I love reading these Devnotes, its always fascinating to get little peaks into how KSP was designed and developed.

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