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KSP Loading... Preview: New Altimeter Toggle!


SQUAD

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1 minute ago, Tyko said:

haha...I agree with you and I'm not asking for a redesign of the interface. I'm just asking for a minimalist approach to the ASL/AGL change, as I think many are. My point was that there's no "common design language" or "consistency" they're trying to match.

Fair enough. At the very least I'm happy to potentially have one less mod in my game. Another one down and only... 70 to go!

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5 hours ago, Poodmund said:

graphical previews through screenshots

To be fair, the OP does contain a video. Obviously not at the level of a test build, but still quite a bit more dynamic than simple screenshots.

5 hours ago, klesh said:

the little triangle and the little light next to the rate of climb circular dial.

39 minutes ago, Tyko said:

amh8Us1.png

Does anyone know what either of those things are for?

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2 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

Does anyone know what either of those things are for?

The circle next to the vertical speed indicator lights up when you have negative vertical velocity.

Edited by RealKerbal3x
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The "radio button" lights up when you are descending at an unsafe speed. (What it considers unsafe, I don't really know.) The upper triangle does... something... it's on the tip of my tongue... I think it lights up when the ship is in a safe condition to be recovered? 

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7 minutes ago, Vanamonde said:

The "radio button" lights up when you are descending at an unsafe speed. (What it considers unsafe, I don't really know.) The upper triangle does... something... it's on the tip of my tongue... I think it lights up when the ship is in a safe condition to be recovered? 

Cool! just repurpose that triangle space that people don't use anyway...make it a single lit button that changes from Green for AGL to Blue for ASL...  DONE!!   :D  

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1 minute ago, Vanamonde said:

I think it lights up when the ship is in a safe condition to be recovered? 

I believe you're partially right. The triangle (or down arrow?) is meant to represent what state the craft is in.

(some time later) - Ok. I've just googled it and found some old old posts from years ago that I won't bother linking to here.

Apparently, if the triangle is unlit then the craft is unstable and you can't leave the flight scene. An orange triangle means the craft is stable but there is something that prevents you from saving or changing scenes, such as if you are moving over terrain. A blue triangle means you can leave to the space center and the drop down buttons appear (the space center button is blue). A green triangle means you can recover the vessel (the recover button is green.)

I don't consider myself a particularly unobservant person, but I never connected all those situations.

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1 hour ago, Tyko said:

Thanks for responding, but your technical explanation just shows how far the considerations you described are from the actual design. The current readout is all over the board in terms of "affordance". Critical items like "Abort" are not even clearly identified as an interactable element.  "Atmosphere", which is IMHO the least useful element, gets space to have the word fully spelled out. 

OWhDJF9.jpg

Since Squad has managed to include such a variety of styles into this one UI element I think it's safe to say you can go in any direction you want. The preponderance of opinion in this thread seems to be that we want a minimalist approach of either a clickable element or radio buttons with minimal text. 

We all look at this display for many more hours than Squad devs do. Why not consider what the community is suggesting rather than shove an unpopular design down our throats and hide behind words like "Affordance" as the reason?

1. I’m commenting based on the assumption that the indicator will change. 

2. Just because the UI wasn’t always designed with solid goals in mind does not make it bad to start doing so now. 

3. Listening to the community is only good if you can discern what they mean from what they say. There are several suggestions in this thread. Some good and some that would make me sigh if they were brought up during a UX meeting.

4. I’m not sure where you’re reading this “deal with it” attitude. As far as I can tell they’re agreeing with us over the indicator but are being wise to not 100% show their hand until they settled on an implementation. 

I suggest we hold back the torches until they've released it. Let their UX/UI guy/girl work his/her magic. Maybe it'll be better than any of us suggested ;).
Have a nice day :)

1 hour ago, HebaruSan said:

Does anyone know what either of those things are for?

If I knew the ins&outs of every button, the women in my life would be a lot happier. 

... I’ll get my coat.

Edited by Jognt
Mobile commenting client freak out clean up
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15 minutes ago, Jognt said:

I suggest we hold back the torches until they've released it. Let their UX/UI guy/girl work his/her magic. Maybe it'll be better than any of us suggested.

If we wait until it's released, it's fixed until at such time the UI comes up for review and modification again.  In other words, outside of being modded (assuming that can be done), years.  That's why we're spending all this effort talking about it and suggesting things now.

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35 minutes ago, Jognt said:

I suggest we hold back the torches until they've released it. Let their UX/UI guy/girl work his/her magic.

30 minutes ago, Jacke said:

If we wait until it's released, it's fixed until at such time the UI comes up for review and modification again.-snip- That's why we're spending all this effort talking about it and suggesting things now.

As @Jacke said, it is much more efficient to do things right the first time, then twice.  Especially for a small studio like Squad.  If they feel they have to refine the same UI elements again in the future, that takes away time and limited resources from other refinements or content additions.  Like the carpentry saying goes: "Measure twice, cut once, not the other way around."

Having said that, this thread has been (thankfully) rather bland in the "torches and pitchforks" compared to other KSP Loading threads in the past.  As long as we keep the thread in a more constructive and brainstorming form of community feedback, I believe Squad will be more receptive to interacting with the community to find good solutions to any game updates.

The community shouldn't be averse to sending feedback (and they definitely aren't :sticktongue:) any more than Squad should be averse to asking for it.  Likewise, the community needs to accept that not everything will be exactly as everyone wants it to be, but keeping the conversation light and constructive generally leads to better solutions for more players.

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38 minutes ago, Jacke said:

If we wait until it's released, it's fixed until at such time the UI comes up for review and modification again.  In other words, outside of being modded (assuming that can be done), years.  That's why we're spending all this effort talking about it and suggesting things now.

Yes and that’s good. I’ve also commented my opinion and suggestions on the UI aspect of the feature. 

Maybe I’m being naive but I don’t believe they’ll ignore everything and push it as-is. 

Feel free to yell at me if they do push it out in a way that is clearly worse than the suggestions though. 

Edit: I know that ‘temporary’ implementations tend to be permanent and 100% agree that it can be way better than this. 

I also know that there actually are plenty of fellow UI/UX people out there that can come up with good implementations. 

Having said that I do wonder “if they have such a person, who signed off on the current version?” but maybe this was still a quick “it works and we will change it” version. ... that tends to become permanent..oh crap..

Screw it! You’re right! Rise up! Burn it before it breeds!

Ps. It must be horrible to be a small dev studio where most of the end-users are well versed in software development :’D

Edited by Jognt
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31 minutes ago, Jognt said:

It must be horrible to be a small dev studio where most of the end-users are well versed in software development :’D

In Squads case, it's more like a double edged sword. They can get a lot of help, praise, and suggestions from the community along with all the criticisms and complaints.

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I just want to say this has been a great conversation and prime example of developer interaction and communal feature exploration done right. The contrast having come from the total chaos of the Elite forums over to KSP is night and day. Well done everyone.

Anyway, there's been a lot of interesting new tidbits of info added to this thread since I last looked at it, and by god thank you for finally revealing the mysteries of the vspd light and the little triangle, that one's had me scratching my head trying to figure out its rules without googling for years. A lot of good suggestions and background info on why the current UI is the way it is and what may be done about it in future, and you even brought mockups! This is perfect because I was only thinking last night how I'd actually prefer a little land/sea icon instead of text or a light for the altimeter mode. Solves a lot of problems regarding screen real estate and localisation, though you do still have to account for accessibility (colour blindness and such) and resolution. If you have enough space to work with, a little icon of a capsule in the sky with a line going straight down to either sea or a mountain slope would make perfectly clear what it's for, so long as it has direct proximity to the altimeter anyway.

Maybe a slim toggle icon on the side like this oversized ms paint doodle (I haven't installed photoshop on this machine yet): CdzkCZO.png

Cheers for the look behind the curtain, @Maxsimal, it's made me even more curious what the first generation dev team's process was for UI design :P

Edited by Loskene
pictorials
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46 minutes ago, Loskene said:

it's made me even more curious what the first generation dev team's process was for UI design :P

Process?!? LOL. It was a few rookies (AFAIK) led by HarvesteR given the chance to work on his 2D rocket game pet project, and it grew and kept growing from there. 

I don’t think the crew had a lot of experience in the early days. 

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9 hours ago, klesh said:

If you’re reworking that area, I would like to add that I have well over 2,000 hours in this game and there are still elements of that upper central UI that I have no idea what they do.  Specifically the little triangle and the little light next to the rate of climb circular dial.    I have never once gone into the Kerbalopedia or whatever that thing is to find this (or frankly anything ever) out.

 

3 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

The "radio button" lights up when you are descending at an unsafe speed. (What it considers unsafe, I don't really know.) The upper triangle does... something... it's on the tip of my tongue... I think it lights up when the ship is in a safe condition to be recovered? 

I think the triangle is to retract the altimiter(Make it dissapera)At least i think soo....

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8 minutes ago, KerbolExplorer said:

I think the triangle is to retract the altimiter(Make it dissapera)At least i think soo....

Well now, the plot thickens. Makes me wonder if anyone, at any time since it was added, has clicked the triangle to see what it does.

I certainly don't remember ever thinking in my playtime "I need to retract the altimeter" and so never would have thought to look for a control for it.

Edited by Loskene
.
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4 hours ago, HvP said:

Apparently, if the triangle is unlit then the craft is unstable and you can't leave the flight scene. An orange triangle means the craft is stable but there is something that prevents you from saving or changing scenes, such as if you are moving over terrain. A blue triangle means you can leave to the space center and the drop down buttons appear (the space center button is blue). A green triangle means you can recover the vessel (the recover button is green.)

@KerbolExplorer & @Loskene, aside from what HvP mentioned in the above quote, the triangle has no other function, and the altimeter widget cannot be retracted.  The reason it's a triangle pointing down has to do with the drop-down options of returning to the space center or (if landed/splashed down) recovering the craft, which appear when mousing over the widget itself.  This also relates to the colors as HvP explained.

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2 minutes ago, Raptor9 said:

@KerbolExplorer & @Loskene, aside from what HvP mentioned in the above quote, the triangle has no other function, and the altimeter widget cannot be retracted.  The reason it's a triangle pointing down has to do with the drop-down options of returning to the space center or (if landed/splashed down) recovering the craft, which appear when mousing over the widget itself.  This also relates to the colors as HvP explained.

Well, mystery solved. I suppose the reason many of us never seem to have made the connection is because during the phases of flight where that tiny indicator would change colour, the player would have their hands full doing more important things, and so never noticed when and why it changed.

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6 hours ago, HvP said:

I don't consider myself a particularly unobservant person, but I never connected all those situations.

I do consider myself a particularly unobservant person, which is why I think I never - EVER - even noticed that triangle was even there.

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"sea level altitude" means nothing except during VAB construction.  During a mission, ACTUAL data is relevant.  Whoa wait... you could actually show both bits of data at the sane time you know...

Come on @SQUAD think this through. Game-ify those aspects of this product that can be gamed.  But for everything else just provide clear, factual data to support player enjoyment. 

Attenuating your corporate attitude to real customers is the single most important aspect of assuring KSP's sustainability.

Edited by Wallygator
punctuation
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15 hours ago, Wallygator said:

"sea level altitude" means nothing except during VAB construction.  During a mission, ACTUAL data is relevant.  Whoa wait... you could actually show both bits of data at the sane time you know...

Come on @SQUAD think this through. Game-ify those aspects of this product that can be gamed.  But for everything else just provide clear, factual data to support player enjoyment. 

Attenuating your corporate attitude to real customers is the single most important aspect of assuring KSP's sustainability.

Good point.  I am in favour if at least having the optipn to show both simultaneously.

Not sure  I agree that sea level altitude only matters in VAB though.  When in orbit having the altitude display constantly re-adjusting could be a bit difficult to read if not distracting or just plain irritating.

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