Simple (?) but really useful change to staging UI

[pbristow]

Hi devs! Thanks once again for the wondrous never-ending time-sink that is KSP.  =;o}

I build a lot of VERY asparagated ships. My current one has 26 stages, and the bottom stage has all 25 pairs of engines, plus the one in the central core, *PLUS* the additional radial-mounted engines on many of those stages, all firing at launch (This is because I'm trying to achieve orbit from a launch at the KSC with the gravity hacked to 10G... Good game, good game. =:o} )

This means that stage 26 shows up in the staging UI as a stack of 30 or 40 engine icons, each of which represents a single pair of engines. If I want to scroll up and check whether any pairs of engines have been accidentally added to the wrong stage, I first have to scroll through all of those icons, which - with so many parts of the ship making the game very laggy (especially after an hour of playing), is a *slow process*! (I'm on a modest 4GB machine, not able to upgrade any time soon.)

I'd like to be able to right click on the orange icon with the stage number, and click "collapse stage", so that stages I don't need to see in detail get shrunk to a reduced, sub-grouped description with a single icon for each *type* of part present, and a number alongside showing how many are there.

I.e., instead of:
 [ENGINE ICON]
 [ENGINE ICON]
 [ENGINE ICON]
 [ENGINE ICON]
 [LAUNCH STABILISER ICON]
 [LAUNCH STABILISER ICON]
 [ENGINE ICON]
 [LAUNCH STABILISER ICON]
 [ENGINE ICON]

just show me:
 [ENGINE ICON]    " x 6"
 [LAUNCH STABILISER ICON] " x 3"

This should make checking the staging of large, complex ships much quicker and easier. It would also make moving parts from (say) stage 5 down to stage 26 much easier, since the intervening stages won't take up quite so much screen space (though obviously any stage with just a pair of speratrors/decouplers in is going to take up just as much space as before, the ones with several pairs of sepatrons in will shrink a bit.) At present, I have to scroll the source stage right to the top of my screen; grab the engine to be moved; drag it to whichever stage is at the bottom of the screen (there seems to be no auto-scrolling... or if there is, it fails!); then scroll *that* stage up to the top; locate the icon for the engine I'm trying to move; then drag it down... and repeat as many times as necessary! =:o\

Of course, we would also need to be able to re-expand selected stages (same method: Right-click and select "expand") once the time comes to drill down into what a particular stage has in it.

An alternative (and possibly simpler to implement) option would be to collapse the selected stage to just the orange stage-icon, nothing else (i.e. forget about me "reduced description" idea. Then all stages (however simple) could be reduced in screen height, which would again help a lot with moving parts up and down a long staging list... Although I'd then have to expand particular stages one by one to hunt for the stray engines, so on balance I prefer my first version of the idea.


Thanks for your attention.

[Kerbal101]

Hello, if you are doing large asparagus, then you are doing something wrong, in my honest opinion.
There are two types of asparagus - horizontal (the classic) and vertical (upper engines fire and consume fuel too).

If this is not sufficient to use and groups tend to grow large, then it better to reduce the load and include docking in orbit (with wielding, for example through USI Konstruktion).

Staging is nothing more than a special set of Action groups. From what I understand, you want to group the actions in the stage together, for which as I remember was at least one mod that allowed that.
Perhaps someone can revive it.

[pbristow]

11 minutes ago, Kerbal101 said:

Hello, if you are doing large asparagus, then you are doing something wrong, in my honest opinion.

...

it better to reduce the load and include docking in orbit (with wielding, for example through USI Konstruktion).

Apparently you missed the point about trying to even *get* to orbit in 10G gravity. =:o}  It is simply *impossible* without either asparagus staging, or unrealistic engine mods.
And there are various other reasons why ships can end up with large numbers of stages, or stages with large numbers of parts. Please don't lets debate them here; that's not the point of this post.

Do you have an opinion on the suggested UI change?
 

Edited July 12, 2017 by pbristow

[Kerbal101]

@pbristow What about 50G? G = payload weight. Gravity, like payload - only hits on engine's TWR, which is why people start either stockpiling more boosters (engine+fuel), or invent clever weight reduction/drop (which is asporagus in essence), or reduce the payload and add an orbital assembly. So yes, my offer is pretty reasonable and yes I have read through your topic and offered a solution to have staging groups.

7 minutes ago, pbristow said:

Do you have an opinion on the suggested UI change?

Sure, here. Otherwise, you'll be overcomplicating existing design to solve a corner case.

Also this. One assigns the actions (engine toggle, separatron activation) in action groups incrementally, then locks the stages with [mod]+L and calls action groups as needed instead.
This mod allows up to 250 "stages".

[Kerbal101]

@pbristow Is this similar to the problem that you have? In that case, the staging UI will need an overhaul.

[pbristow]

"What about 50G?"
 Are you saying you've successfully built a ship in KSP that reaches orbit from the surface of Kerbin under 50G, using only stock (or stockalike) parts? If so, please show me where! 

Your suggestions seem to be all to do with actions and action groups (or am I missing something?). I'm talking about the *icons*, i.e. the way things are displayed, not the actions.


 

Edited July 12, 2017 by pbristow

[pbristow]

"Is this similar to the problem that you have?"
 

Similar, but different. That post is about symmetry-groups of icons *within* a stage being expanded when the icon representing that symmetry-group is clicked. I'm talking about one level of grouping above that, where there are many separate symmetry-groups, all in the same stage.

Example: I add a pair of engines to a stage using 2-way symmetry; These engines are represented in the staging list by a single icon, with a tiny number "2" to show there are 2 engines in the group.  I then add another pair of engines, physically mounted on a different stage. Again, this appears as a single icon, with a little "2". But because I want all engines to fire at launch, I now drag that icon from the stage it's in down to the initial stage. That stage now has two icons, each one representing a pair of engines. 

Now repeat that process 30 times. Result: The label showing the stage number has disappeared off the top of the screen, and all I have down the right side of my screen is a vast column of engine icons, each one representing a different pair of engines. All that this display communicates to me is "Wow, this stage sure as a *lot* of pairs of engines!". It's not useful information, and the presentation of it interferes with being able to edit the stack. 

Clear now?
 

Edited July 12, 2017 by pbristow

[Kerbal101]

@pbristow By design, you are not expected to edit engines in symmetry groups - if you need 16 engines, pick 16x symmetry and move these groups. If you are arranging 16 engines by using 16 times 1 engine, you are doing it wrong. Dragging an engine out of this group is considered "exception", if you are doing it constantly, you are using an approach which is against design. The action groups will not even allow to pick individual component from symmetry group.

 

1 hour ago, pbristow said:

 Are you saying you've successfully built a ship in KSP that reaches orbit from the surface of Kerbin under 50G, using only stock (or stockalike) parts? If so, please show me where! 

No need to twist my words or trying to look smart, the thrust value of stock engines is not designed for 50G or excessive loads. This will be similar to getting first cosmic speed using propellers and stockpiling engines in TWR quest will lead to problems, which would never surface under vanilla conditions, which I meant with "50G".

[linuxgurugamer]

I have a similar problem.  For various reasons its a Very large vessel, and there are somewhere between 30 and 50  icons in each stage.  Total part count is approaching 750, and it is extremely unwieldy to work on the staging.

So I'd like to see a discussion of the stated problem, and not talk about the reasons behind the number of icons

Edited July 13, 2017 by linuxgurugamer
Fixed typos fro phone

[RatchetinSpace]

Good suggestion imo. I don't have quite the same problem but my craft generally have many stages and it'd be nice for them to be organised.

[pbristow]

linuxgurugamer, RatchetinSpace, thanks for your support.

Kerbal101, it seems that you and have very different goals in playing KSP, so let's just agree to differ. You play the game your way, I'll play it mine, and hopefully we'll both have fun. =:o}
 

[linuxgurugamer]

I had started work on something along these lines, but it's been languishing since I got past my initial need for it.

For now, I've gotten to the point where I have a window with a button for each stage, but haven't yet progressed beyond that.  My thinking is something along the lines of clicking a stage button to open a window showing all the items for the stage.  But I haven't yet figured out how to display the icons rather than a scrollable list of parts.  I don't particularly want to implement a drag'n'drop interface for this, so I may just use a scrollable list

Edited July 13, 2017 by linuxgurugamer

[Kerbal101]

@pbristow I don't have a different way, rather than I don't push the game into situations that demands solutions, which expose shortcomings under these situations only.
Due to technological and time limitations KSP certainly has areas to improve - I have encountered cases requiring workarounds myself, and because it won't happen in a blink of eye - have pointed how to possibly solve the problem and to explain why things are as they are.

Stage management can certainly have some work, I would welcome the unification of Action group and Staging together under single tool with unlimited entries, ability of cross-dependencies, incapsulation and smart operations when adding/removing parts. Imagine a RnD map, but for stages and connectable via dragndrop. But this would be one huge rework, imho.

I am still puzzled, why someone offering a workaround is seen as opposing. The people who support your idea are all having to manage large amount of triggers for various reasons, difficulty of managing which under current model was not denied by me.

[linuxgurugamer]

5 minutes ago, Kerbal101 said:

@pbristow I don't have a different way, rather than I don't push the game into situations that demands solutions, which expose shortcomings under these situations only.
Due to technological and time limitations KSP certainly has areas to improve - I have encountered cases requiring workarounds myself, and because it won't happen in a blink of eye - have pointed how to possibly solve the problem and to explain why things are as they are.

Stage management can certainly have some work, I would welcome the unification of Action group and Staging together under single tool with unlimited entries, ability of cross-dependencies, incapsulation and smart operations when adding/removing parts. Imagine a RnD map, but for stages and connectable via dragndrop. But this would be one huge rework, imho.

I am still puzzled, why someone offering a workaround is seen as opposing. The people who support your idea are all having to manage large amount of triggers for various reasons, difficulty of managing which under current model was not denied by me.

The problem is that you were offering a workaround which doesn't work.

For various reasons, I have a vessel right now which has somewhere between 30 and 50 engines in a single stage.  Due to the way the vessel was built, there is no symmetry (don't ask why, just accept that it can happen), so working on the staging is a real pain.  Took me a long time with lots of fiddling to get it right, and even now, I'm spending way too much time on test launches, etc because the staging is still not reliable.

It's also entirely possible that there is a language issue here (I noticed your Russian links), and what you wrote may not have come across the way you meant.

 

Edited July 13, 2017 by linuxgurugamer

[Kerbal101]

@linuxgurugamer I see. Well, this reminds me of problems N-1 had.

[Tyko]

I support this idea