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Devnote Tuesday: Wednesday Edition!


SQUAD

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While I'm thrilled to see some of the new features in screenshots, the orbits look wonderful, I'm very disappointed to see how rigid the filtering in the tracking station remains.  I was really hoping they would take the opportunity to add more categories and perhaps make it more scale-able for mods.  Instead we are going to have to continue put up with a massive list of craft making it difficult to find the one you want to fly, made worse by the inclusion of RoverDude's new relay feature which means more craft in the same categories.

Edited by Alshain
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1 minute ago, mattinoz said:

Those sexy orbit line deserve an equally good font to go with them. Just saying.

Did you look at the second screenshot (the one from Arsonide)... wish granted.

Edited by Alshain
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3 minutes ago, johnnyhandsome said:

Not thrilled to hear that the developers are skipping their 2 week holiday vacation. 1.1 is super important, don't rush. Another month or two to tweak and perfect this would be totally fine. Because this is going to be HUGE, so let's get it right!

My thoughts. We only have to look at all the previous major 1.x releases to know that rushing is not a good idea. Just get us a 1.0.6 release with shiny new rocket parts in February and makes us really happy with a high quality 1.1 release somewhere in May!

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3 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Felipe was not the only one to take advantage of these new features: Brian (Arsonide) has also jumped on the opportunity to fix one particular issue that was often encountered when dealing with contracts: the direction of the orbit of objects was often quite hard to discern, but the new orbital lines that scale up once they get closer to the object now clarifies the situation as you can see here.

Any chance of implementing this for all orbiting craft?  This or even the 1.0.5 arrows would make rendezvous much easier when one is needing to determine orbital direction.

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We appreciate Squad's efforts and their sacrifices during the Holiday season.  Thanks so much!  It's like Squad is composed of Santa's green Kerbal elves.

The only video of green Santa's Elves that I could find is this, oops!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJSBXt_VOOA

 

Edited by Dispatcher
Added "Kerbal" to make the connection more obvious.
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I've never been more excited for interfaces!

I really like the orbital lines. Sometimes it's hard to keep orbital direction straight in your head and that's a very subtle, unobtrusive cue. I am curious if the twitchy intercept splines are being dealt with for good though...

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3 hours ago, Yakuzi said:

great dev notes thanks guys! Also for working through your holidays, just make sure you don't burn yourselves out and take at least Christmas day off and your two weeks of holiday as soon as 1.1 is released ( make that 1.1.1 :wink:)... @Dr_Turkey I know, I'm fired... I'll let myself out

 

Security! Escort him faster.

3 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Main development is hindering console development?

Development for PC is extremely flexible and agile, builds change and evolve in beautiful flexible ways. Development for consoles is not so flexible, there are rules, norms, timelines and  several different filters and QA certification processes to strictly adhere to. In very general terms, main development keeps trudging on forward like a giant, and console can sometimes struggle to keep up due to the nature of it's (tiny legs) enviroment .

 

2 hours ago, Dispatcher said:

We appreciate Squad's efforts and their sacrifices during the Holiday season.  Thanks so much!  It's like Squad is composed of Santa's green Kerbal elves.

 

Damn, they're unto us guys. Leave no witnesses

Edited by Dr_Turkey
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The new orbital lines remind me a bit of the old 0.13 lines where Pe and Ap had different shade. l always love it when you guys revisit old ideas... And despite the text displayed during the forum upgrade we haven't forgotten about the magic boulder yet! #Savethemagicboulder <3 lol

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6 hours ago, Speadge said:

whut? (i read it 5 times - still no clue what u r about to say)

[if its about the splines of the planets - they get their "back" lightened up(to see which direction they are coming from), like a trail; its not about their future position]

well, since they are in elliptical orbits, where they were 2s ago (the past) is where they will be again after their orbital period minus 2s (the future).  So it's really showing both future and past.  If you consider the splines for objects that you can add maneuver nodes to, it makes more sense to me if you would brighten what's ahead of them rather than what's behind them.  But whatever...  I've adapted to plenty of other counter-intuitive stuff.

Danny

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2 hours ago, CrashTestDanny said:

well, since they are in elliptical orbits, where they were 2s ago (the past) is where they will be again after their orbital period minus 2s (the future).  So it's really showing both future and past.  If you consider the splines for objects that you can add maneuver nodes to, it makes more sense to me if you would brighten what's ahead of them rather than what's behind them.  But whatever...  I've adapted to plenty of other counter-intuitive stuff.

Danny

I'm not discounting your feeling of it being counter-intuitive to you, but I would like to mention why your method would be counter-intuitive to me (and it seems like I'm not alone).

When someone illustrates the motion of an object, like a ball being thrown in a game of catch, they often put motion lines opposite the direction of travel to depict the object flying through the air. I can only guess it's to show motion so the ball doesn't just appear to be a hovering orb between two children. In this manner the direction of travel - and the fact of travel - can quite easily be determined.

In a likewise fashion these new orbit lines are indicating the motion and direction of the object. Obviously with a moving image like that of a video game the lines become less necessary. However, from a distant enough viewpoint with zero time compression, like what you might experience zoomed out in map mode in KSP, the objects in motion may appear to be barely moving. However, if you add these motion lines trailing the object it becomes just like the playing catch illustration: easy to determine existence and direction of motion. Add to it that the future trajectory of that object is still displayed (although not highlighted as you and others would prefer) and it paints a clear picture to me what is going on at a glance. For me, if the depiction of motion was reversed it would look like everything was moving backwards like a video in rewind.

Certainly everyone can look at things differently and this is my perspective. Since the devs do seem focused on maintaining/increasing the mod-ability of KSP maybe this too will be another aspect that is easily adjusted to accommodate everyone's preference. 

Edited by Mako
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8 hours ago, pellinor said:

Usually I care more about where I am headed than where I come from. So the orbital prediction (the future part of the trajectory) is the most important part. And this part is currently drawn faintly, and hard to see with for the darker orbit colors. I think both ways are sort of intuitive, but flipping the brightness would give better usability.

Completely agree

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