Jump to content

Please revert all vab controls back to ksp1


Recommended Posts

Why would you change the controls of the far more intuitive vab controls from KSP 1 to the absolutely terrible control scheme that is ksp2 assembly anchor and launch assembly. The core controls was nearly perfect but you just had to completely rework what was already a very good system. I am not the only one that is very annoyed with the constantly buggy and unintuitive vab controls.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This. Of my top three suggestions, this is number 1 (maneuver node planner being number 2 tied with the trajectory/conics bug, and GUI re-sizing being 3). I'm trying to keep my suggestions to things that I'd assume (I'm no developer, so who knows), would be easier to implement sooner rather than later (obviously things like performance/visuals/etc are all things we want, but priority and time-sink wise some of those may take awhile to implement)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just spent several minutes frustrated before I figured out I was in assembly anchor mode even though I had very much clicked it off. Turning the indicator button on and off didn't do anything to turn the mode on or off.

Having to middle-mouse drag to move camera view up or down, plus it frequently snapping the camera back to whatever anchor/root part, is driving me crazy too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't mind the anchor system, in theory. In practice, it leaves much to be desired. Here are some of the things I've run into, feel free to add on if I jog anyone's memory.

first off. The horizontal pan on the VAB camera is non-existent. Fine mostly, for rockets. But building planes with it is an exercise in frustration. You used to be able to hold shift to switch between rotate and pan. Having it on the middle mouse button (wheel) means it messes with the zoom function.

Next  The move tool is to cluttered. I found it difficult to grab the arrow I wanted and I hated having rotate and translate on the same tool. I miss the rotate globe.

Anchors, well the buttons again are to small. When the pan didn't work as expected I thought maybe changing the anchor would recenter the camera on the new anchor. It did not. These problems, and the buttons just not responding sometimes had me pulling out hair.

Part manager, again to clutted, and far to large. It was good that it opened on the part I clicked on, but with the dropdowns and long list of parts I still found it difficult to figure out/find what part I was affecting. A highlight would go a long way, maybe break it up by stages? I like the idea of it, but if I just want to mess with the part I clicked on I found myself wishing for the old P.A.W menus.  

Wings, I'm on the fence. I found the sliders not fine grained enough to use efficiently. The lack of text adjustments didn't make sense. Like the box is there with a number, why can't I click on it and just type what I want? All and all I preferred the way the procedural wings mod did it, via a combination of draggable handles and the box with sliders and text input. And all of this is only when they worked. I often had to exit the VAB and re-enter because I could just not activate the shape tool, could not grab them again after placing them, and could not attach parts to them.

Action groups, I haven't really messed with them. But I will say this. I thought it was silly to have that in the same window as the part manager. I don't need the parts list when doing action groups. Just leave where it was, replacing the list.

The list, It's much improved, I give them that. There isn't enough categories though. Some of the condensed choices just baffled me. It took a hot min to figure out how to get rid of a part on the mouse. And It frustrated me that when I was trying to drop a part I had to find an empty space to do it without picking up another part at the same time. Could we not do that? The only other issue I have is the part size isn't clear by name only. So it makes it harder to deal with in the part manager. 

Placing parts, while mostly straightforward. What was missing, and is just default muscle memory for me is holding shift to force it to only connect to nodes. I honestly didn't realize how much I rely on that to be efficient. 

So that's all I can think of for the moment. This is more not working as expected/user friendly and less this is broken, aside from the wings. I think muscle memory is biasing me. But I don't think that's exactly a me problem. I'm hoping we can meet more in the middle here.

 

Edited by snkiz
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 2/24/2023 at 8:56 PM, mcwaffles2003 said:

What about them is bad? I get it takes a bit of getting used to but for instance I like that middle click and drag moves up and down. 

Well for one, I use a trackball, a Kensington Expert Mouse.  I've used them for 20 years and on my 3rd one. I literally hate mice.  KEM as a scroll ring, I can map a middle click to one of the 2 unused buttons, but to effectively use it, I have to use 2 hands... If there was an option for rebinding a middle mouse click to a key, that would solve the problem.  There is no such thing.  I see no reason why there should not be an option for legacy VAB controls...  Old keyboard controls using the arrow keys and + /- worked well and were intuitive. 

I am Incredibly disappointed in this release after 3 years in development... Early Access or not... If this is what they came up with in three years, I don't see this getting much better anytime fast, if ever... Performance is also an major issue... Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3080TI, 64GB DDR 4-3600... Any large rocket launching is abysmal with low FPS.  After about 10hr's in, I really just want to cry...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, RandyBoBandy420 said:

Well for one, I use a trackball, a Kensington Expert Mouse.  I've used them for 20 years and on my 3rd one. I literally hate mice.  KEM as a scroll ring, I can map a middle click to one of the 2 unused buttons, but to effectively use it, I have to use 2 hands... If there was an option for rebinding a middle mouse click to a key, that would solve the problem.  There is no such thing.  I see no reason why there should not be an option for legacy VAB controls...  Old keyboard controls using the arrow keys and + /- worked well and were intuitive. 

Raise the issue and see if it gets heard. Devs have listened to community requests several times already

3 hours ago, RandyBoBandy420 said:

I am Incredibly disappointed in this release after 3 years in development... Early Access or not... If this is what they came up with in three years, I don't see this getting much better anytime fast, if ever... Performance is also an major issue... Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3080TI, 64GB DDR 4-3600... Any large rocket launching is abysmal with low FPS.  After about 10hr's in, I really just want to cry...

Keep in mind though that this is still the tip of the iceberg as many things we've seen implemented arent in this release, likely cause they want to find the bugs iteratively and I have no doubt that they know the game has its bugs, which is probably part of the reason they went for early access in the way they did. Obviously T2 had a hand in pushing this game to release and I would say it could have spent a bit more time in the oven ideally, but you work with what you got. I just think the incompleteness would be even more staggering if they introduced the whole roadmap at once and the process of finding, focusing on, and patching bugs would be far more spread out, more difficult to nail down, and probably lead to a much less flexible code at the end of the day. 

At the end of the day if the games state is depressing, pretend it didn't release and see where it is in a couple months, KSP 1 is still there for now

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I greatly prefer the single rotate/translate tool to having to switch between two buttons in KSP1, and being kicked back into selector mode unintentionally all the time.

While it’s still a bit rough I find building in KSP2 to be much easier and more enjoyable overall.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nah.

Forget the KSP1, get used to it. I did, and it's only two days. Remember that it not only has to work with both horizontal and vertical assemblies, but also multiples of them in the same scene. Scroll for zoom is logical, so is camera focus. Anchor==root, except you don't have to click two parts for no reason, and (but admittedly coming out lf the tool is glitchy). Yes the move/rotate gizmo should be bigger. Anything else? No, don't think so, building is easy.

Edited by The Aziz
Link to comment
Share on other sites

- The camera resets every so often for apparently no reason

- A part that you take off the assembly will 'jump' somhow to the mousecursor (I think the center of gravity will go to the mouse cursor. That is *very* annoying and was actually an issue in KSP 1 and then was solved there.

- Horizontal panning is a must for larger builds

- Picking a part / subassembly and then changing height is slooooow.

 

The question is if it is necessary at all to change the control layout. I don't see a reason. There were many improvements over the time made in KSP 1. The system was quite refined in the end and I didn't hear many complaints. Why create a new one at all? Maybe it will turn out good, but the middle-click is really bad. On my Thinkpad it is pretty much unsusable (I use the trackpad). And some (in my experience: most) mice don't have nice and responsive middle buttons at all.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

The current VAB controls are a significant step back in my opinion. There are certainly some new features that I like that leverage some of the new tools in the VAB, and there are some occasional limitations and bugs in KSP1's VAB/SPH even to this day, but overall this is an instance of why they say "If it isn't broke, don't fix it."

Before anyone says this is just people set in their ways and resistant to change or progress, this isn't the case. The VAB experience of the early KSP1 versions in 2011-2014 timeframes was quite raw, just how it is now in KSP2. KSP2 certainly has more tools compared to the early access version of KSP1, but the overall VAB experience in KSP1 was very well tuned after years and years of player feedback into how they felt KSP1's VAB/SPH experiences could be improved. It seems that there was a lot of institutional knowledge as to why the KSP1 VAB experience was the way it was, that was either lost or disregarded in an effort to rebuild the experience from scratch. As a result, we are back to square one and the developers and community are going to have to rediscover why the solutions fielded in KSP1 were implemented in the first place.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I find the middle click drag to be quite awkward myself. Not sure why - other games use middle click drag to eg rotate camera and that feels OK. Possibly just the combination of vertical mouse movement while holding the wheel (as opposed to horizontal when rotating camera in other games). I do use a 'vertical' mouse rather than a standard one, could be a factor. Middle click drag feels really slow at moving the camera, that could also be a factor. Maybe increasing the movement speed would help, or maybe something else - an option for a keybind to control vertical movement (eg q/z or something).

Other than that, controls feel good to me. Really like the scroll zoom.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's not so much the camera controls I have a problem with, I can get used to those. It's the UI elements themselves and how you interact with them.

For example, the Parts Action Window in KSP1 was a much more efficient method of presenting and interacting with part-specific data than the monolithic Parts Manager they have now. When I right-click on a part, I want to interact with that part only. Presenting information about all parts on the entire craft is inefficient in that it forces me to concentrate more on interacting with the Parts Manager itself to process all of the data that I don't want at that moment, instead of focusing on just the data I am requesting at that moment in time. This will be especially important when designing large interstellar ships in the future.

Another example is how there is now a gap between the parts palette and the edge of the screen. In KSP1, if I didn't like a part or wanted to get rid of several parts quickly, I could simply click on them and jerk my mouse to the left side of the screen. I didn't even have to look at where the mouse was when I left-clicked to throw the part away because I knew my mouse was up against the far left side of my screen, and anywhere along the left side would allow me to left-click again to drop the part to delete it. Now, I have to pause what I am doing and place the unwanted parts in a very narrow target area in the bottom left part of the screen to delete them. This may sound like an inconsequential issue, with a difference of fractions of a second, but its the cumulative time spent needed to hit a smaller target each time I remove a part and the attention constantly being pulled away from my craft to focus specifically on the action of deleting the part. This is quite cumbersome over several hours of gameplay.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, Raptor9 said:

Now, I have to pause what I am doing and place the unwanted parts in a very narrow target area in the bottom left part of the screen to delete them.

Not really. Just aim in an empty place anywhere in the part picker. Or I guess hit Delete button? Not sure if that one works, I never used it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Not really. Just aim in an empty place anywhere in the part picker.

But that doesn't make a difference. That's just saying aim for a different target altogether. The point is that if you move the mouse to the far left side, you'll simply drop the part into the VAB again because of the gap between the edge of the screen and the parts palette. And depending on what parts category you have displayed, in some cases the entire parts palette saturated with parts from top to bottom so now you may inadvertently select a different part, and then you need to delete that one.

Are there alternatives? Of course. But the point is to increase efficiency where possible, not workarounds. However, that was just an example to illustrate my point of how a lot of small changes to the UI accumulate to reduce efficiency in several areas of gameplay and UI/UX, it's not a prime issue of the UI that I think needs addressed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A tip for all who hold middle mouse button to move the camera around... Just use middle mouse click instead to focus on certain part. You don't even have to select desired part initially, just something close to it, and than re-click once camera moves. After an hour, you'll find that it's way faster than Shift + scroll, especially when working with multiple assemblies. You can fly through entire VAB in a nanosecond.

Edited by cocoscacao
Link to comment
Share on other sites

For those that say "get used to it".....    Imagine if you had to scroll up or down through this very page using middle mouse click hold and drag.  It would take long before most of you would be complaining to the web dev.   Same true is here.  Rockets are mostly vertical.  Builders tend to scroll up and down way more than zoom in and out.  Once the zoom level is set we may only zoom and out a bit here or there.  But we scroll up and down a lot.   Please have old VAB controls be an option.

 

System SPECS - 

Dell XPS 8950
12 Gen i7 12700 2.10 GHz
32 GB DDR5 RAM
512GB NVMe M.2  & 2TB 7200RPM SATA
NVidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti  8GB
Windows 11  Ver 22H2

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/17/2023 at 8:52 AM, Raptor9 said:

In KSP1, if I didn't like a part or wanted to get rid of several parts quickly, I could simply click on them and jerk my mouse to the left side of the screen.

Funny, I've got thousands of hours into KSP1 and never knew that. Been using the Delete key since day one and it still works fine. :)

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't honestly have a problem with the new controls.  Yes, they are a little different, but that's just a case of getting familiar with them.

That doesn't mean I think they are perfect, there is certainly room for some tweaks and improvement, as always.

No different to getting  a new car and all the switches are in different places.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This thread is quite old. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...