Jump to content

The new UI for KSP2 - improvements and regressions from previous concepts?


Recommended Posts

12 minutes ago, jastrone said:

navball.png

divided into four big sections that all have smaller sections but they all look the same.  this navball has all the same thing as the one shown but its just more consistent

I was going to say that the heading, altitude, and speed values should be on top of their tapes because the tapes are difficult to read at a glance, and looking at the top, you don't want to have to decipher which number corresponds to which value when you need precise numbers. But the more I thought about it, after a short time playing, I would quickly understand that the left number corresponds to the left tape, the middle number to the middle tape, and the right number to the right tape, and then when doing landings, those two numbers are almost as close as they can get. I think the issue comes down to whether rapidly looking to the left and right of the navball is fine. I think it is, so I'd like the numbers to be on the tapes, but I don't think that the numbers on top would necessarily be bad. 

Keep the maneuver meter on the dedicated maneuver node element though; there's enough information at the bottom of the navball and it shouldn't be crowded further. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

There's no room for the tapes here

yes the inner circle, they dont have to be that wide

1 hour ago, t_v said:

there's enough information at the bottom of the navball and it shouldn't be crowded further. 

i think its good tho keep that information on the same place because they would be easily distinctable if you just make them different colors and that information was just on or of things like sas and  rcs so you would probably only look at the manouver thing anyways

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A couple additional thoughts on the UI that haven't been discussed as much:

First, I'd like to explicitly state that I prefer the navball in the corner of the screen.  This is because space in the vertical 1/3 and horizontal 1/3 of the screen is prime real-estate that's best used to view the craft in space.  I don't mind if there's an option to move the navball to the center, it's great to give players a choice to play how they want.

I also like the fact that the navball area is very compact, with multiple indicators (AP/PE levels, vertical speed, atmosphere, tapes, etc) in the same area.  This means the player's eyes don't need to jump rapidly across the screen.

Second, it would be nice if a kerbal's class (pilot, engineer, scientist) is displayed as a small icon over their portrait.  In KSP1 it was very tedious finding which kerbal was the engineer and selecting them for EVA construction, or finding the scientist to reset an experiment via EVA.  Of course, this assumes kerbal classes are a mechanic in KSP2, if there are significant differences here then this idea may need tweaking or become invalid.

Here's a mock-up that I made with small class icons overlaid over the portraits.  Using icons that simultaneously use different colors and have very distinct shapes make identification at a glance easier.

M3DLtPU.png

Finally, points #1 and #2 can potentially be combined by shifting the portrait view to the left so it's in the top-left corner of the screen.  Again, the idea here is that the middle areas are often necessary to comfortably view your craft in space without zooming out too much.  It would be great to have center/corner as an option so players can choose what works for them.

mlH2L3O.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/30/2022 at 10:10 AM, ShadowZone said:

Thanks for the mention and the great work aggregating the feedback so far!

Unfortunately I didn't find this thread until my video was already released or I would have mentioned it. But I'll put a link in the video description.

Here's the video btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvs6e92SqNg

 

You're welcome, and thank you! The observations in your video are great, and my mind was blown by you pointing out that the orientation markers now change depending on whether you are in surface mode or orbit mode :o I updated the first post with some timestamps to your video since there's some cool stuff people should check out.

Looking forward to your thoughts as a UI/UX professional once you get your hands on the Early Access release!

On 10/30/2022 at 10:38 AM, ShadowZone said:

Image

Yeah people made me aware of my mistake already... I really never noticed that thing.

Clearly this is a sign that the vertical speed indicator wasn't super useful in its KSP1 form, isolated away from the navball and without colouring to show what rate of speed was "bad".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wanted to add onto something briefly touched upon earlier -- different color schemes. I personally have astigmatism (my eyes are the wrong shape) and this creates a kind of ghosting effect around bright lights. One of the main downsides of this is that it makes any UI with white text on black much harder to read, as the text becomes blurry and confusing. I would love to see a light mode option so I do not have to struggle to read the UI while under time pressure. 

Cheers!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

While it looks nice....... Co-op play, or nothing. Lets be realistic.. with 64 gigs of ram and a banging processor, I can make ksp1 look fantastic, add interstellar travel, and build mining facilities/eco platforms already with mods.  At a 50$ pricetag, it better have functional CO-op. I won't even touch it until it does.

Edited by Talavar
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Talavar said:

While it looks nice....... Co-op play, or nothing. Lets be realistic.. with 64 gigs of ram and a banging processor, I can make ksp1 look fantastic, add interstellar travel, and build mining facilities/eco platforms already with mods.  At a 50$ pricetag, it better have functional CO-op. I won't even touch it until it does.

The problem with KSP 1 is that you need 64 gigs of ram and a banging processor to get it out of the early 90s in terms of graphics and to be able to do anything slightly ambitious with rockets without pushing 2fps. That, and even if you do get your modpack to run nicely, it's still going to look like a somewhat ugly mash of different assets and features because that's exactly what it is. KSP 2 will have all these features properly integrated within each other and have gameplay loops built on top of them. You can't have that with KSP 1, no matter how good you are at building modpacks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I also really like the mockup of @Xelo. What's good about it is that the velocity scales are on the same side of the ball (in contrast to the current ui iteration). So I thought I could refine it a little. This is what I've come up with:

grafik.png

Some things to highlight here:

  • There are 3 modes: good ol' navball, 2D horizon (for planes, rovers etc.) and a docking mode (shoutout to docking port alignment indicator mod). The modes will replace the main navigation instrument and the panel at the bottom with the small scales so that only the important stuff for the current situation is displayed.
  • Used the old SAS options. I don't really like the new round menu and don't see its advantage. I guess the idea is to help understanding the ship's orientation but the navball is already showing it much better and it just takes up more space.
  • Removed that big pesky throttle knob (like already suggested). Let users just click (and drag) in the scale. (A smaller knob at the side or center may also look not too bad.) I also added buttons for full and no throttle (because I always forget the keyboard shortcuts for it and it may not be so easy to get to 0% or 100% with mouse clicks, at least without dragging).
  • The height scale has another mode to display the distance to target (useful for docking)
  • Only one leading minus sign for the ETAs in the bottom.
  • Use common abbreviation "LVL" instead "LEV"
  • Takes a bit less space than the current ui iteration. If you also consider the SAS options this design is of course considerably smaller. However, you are losing a lot of those "transparent margins".
  • Nice to have: Since the design is relatively balanced it would also look reasonable when centering it.  (I think it makes a lot of sense to push it to the side but I heard that it is planned to offer a ksp1-like option)

One idea I had (but not sure if it's really well thought out) was to allow dragging the navball and heading tape in the plane mode with the mouse. This would not effect the ship but allow a user to better understand the position of markers. Releasing the button will return the displays to the current ship orientation. This would be useful to search for mission markers. 

Edited by Lorion
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/31/2022 at 12:59 PM, poopslayer78 said:

M3DLtPU.png

 

Actually, you can see that some of the kerbals, have derpy eye variations, like one of the show and tells mentioned. I like it!

Edited by Catto
Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Catto said:

Actually, you can see that some of the kerbals, have derpy eye variations, like one of the show and tells mentioned. I like it!

Skip showing the last name if it's the same for everyone. Add some default face / expression variety (like grins, scars, glasses, tattoos, piercings).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One feature I'd really like is a magnify on mouse hover over GUI elements with a font size less than some amount.  I like to have smallish GUI elements so I get a better game view, but later in play as my eyes get more tired smaller text can get harder to read quickly.  Many fields I don't use often, so don't want them in the way, when I do want to read them I want clear and accurate read.  So configurable magnify on mouse hover would be stellar

Edited by darthgently
Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...