Snark

It's not just a question of abuse, it's a question of you can't magically invent value. "Likes" are, in effect, a form of currency. There are a certain number of them going 'round, and people attach value to them only because they're finite. Imagine that we installed a forum update so that every post that everyone makes automatically and instantly gets 1 million likes. That's amazing, right? Everybody would be overjoyed because everyone would have tons of affirmation, right? Well, no. All that would do would be to completely devalue likes and make them meaningless. That little rush you get when a post of yours gets a lot of likes? You only get that because not everything gets likes. Since they're in finite supply, that's what gives value to a thing. It's an unavoidable rule of economics. Increasing the "likes supply" is only going to result in "likes inflation" and nothing more. So, although we understand people's desire to give likes to things and feeling like they "want more"... raising the limits wouldn't improve folks' feelings of kudos, any more than printing a bunch of money will make everyone richer. There's another issue at play, as well: Raising the "likes" limit would disproportionately give influence to the loudest voices. Suppose we allowed 1000 likes per day per person. The vast majority of members aren't going to use anywhere near their quota (heck, they're not even using their current 25), because they simply don't have time to read 1000 things in a day... but folks who are especially determined and want to make their voices heard above everyone else would have a very disproportionate influence. The net effect would be that the large majority of likes in the forum would come from a tiny minority of very "loud", determined people, and would become less representative of the forum population as a whole. And that right there is, to me, perhaps the strongest argument not to raise the cap. Our observation has been that the very large majority of users-- we're talking over 95%-- don't come even close to hitting their 25-likes-in-a-day cap. That doesn't mean they're apathetic, that doesn't mean they're not reading stuff in the forums, and they do issue likes; it's just not dozens a day. If the overwhelming majority of users don't hit the cap, then that means that the cap is essentially irrelevant to them. If you're one of the few people who is hitting that cap and feeling constrained by it... well, that means you're especially passionate and/or happen to have a lot of time to devote to the forums, and that's great. But the fact that you're hitting the limit means that your "voice of approval" is already considerably "louder" than everyone else's, and isn't a persuasive argument to make it even more so. Let other people have their voices, too.

Some content has been redacted and/or removed. Folks, we understand that folks are passionate about space travel and also passionate about the game, and it's fine to argue passionately... but let's keep things civil, please.

Thank you for being helpful to the community! Unfortunately, for various reasons including legal ones, anyone providing executable content (whether it's an in-game mod, or an out-of-game tool/utility) needs to follow the add-on posting rules, which involves giving it its own thread under (in this case) KSP2 Mod Releases, with information about license, link to source code, and so forth. (yes, we know it's a standalone utility and not an actual "mod" per se, since it doesn't run in-game, but there's no separate forum for utilities, and the same rules apply as with mods) In short, it's not allowed to just post a link to a thing, like in this post. Yes, we know it's a hassle, and we're really sorry about that, especially since you didn't do anything wrong and are just trying to be helpful to the community. Unfortunately, it's one of those areas where the rules are hard and we don't really have any wiggle room, because of issues around licensing and permissions and stuff. You're welcome to post your link in the forum, but if you do, you need (alas) to jump through the necessary hoops to create a thread for it under Add-on Releases, and then you could link to your thread from here if you like. Again, we're sorry for the inconvenience.

Hello, and welcome to the forums! Moving your question to Gameplay Questions.

Some content has been removed. Please stay on topic and don't make things personal, folks. The topic here is the game itself, not how you feel about other people's posting habits.

Some content has been removed and/or redacted. Please don't make things personal, and try to stay on topic. The topic of this thread is about Take Two and Private Division. The topic is not how you feel about other people posting in the thread. Thank you for your understanding.

Some content has been redacted and/or removed. Folks, please try to stick to the discussion at hand. Don't make personal remarks, don't comment on other users' behavior, and don't get into arguments about arguing. Also, please bear in mind that everyone has their own opinion, which they are entitled to just as much as you are entitled to yours. You can address substantive points or provide your own opinion, but other people's opinions are not yours to judge. Thank you for your understanding.

Some content has been removed, due to interpersonal bickering that contributes nothing constructive and does not actually help answer the OP's question. Folks, please don't make things personal. It's not appropriate to lob public accusations and recriminations at each other. Also, please try to stay on-topic, which means addressing the poster's concerns. In this case, the OP appears to be a player, not a modder, who is asking what tool they can use for organizing the mods that they use. Therefore, if you have advice as a player as to what tools may (or may not) be useful, then that is appropriate to post, here. Bear in mind that a modder's experience of working with a tool bears little relationship to the user's experience. The bickering we've removed, here, was a bunch of modders sniping each other about their experiences, which has absolutely zero bearing on a player's experience of using the tool and therefore is completely unhelpful here, even if it were civil and otherwise appropriate (which it wasn't). Please don't try to make this about you. So, with that in mind, can we please try to focus on welcoming the poster to the forum and helping them with their question, rather than airing your own grievances? Hello @TateSV, and welcome to the forum! By far the most common tool that folks have used over the years for organizing their KSP mods is called CKAN. There exist others, but that's overwhelmingly the most common. (I'm not endorsing it as "best" or otherwise, merely observing that it's in very common use.) Many people like to use it. Some people prefer other tools, and some (like myself) just organize their stuff manually without any tool. If you're interested, you can give it a try and see whether it meets your needs or not. Since I haven't used it myself, I'm not in a position to give advice on what it's like to use. People who have used tools here can give feedback on what their experience has been, and what they do or don't care for about the tools they use.

Some content has been redacted and/or removed. Folks, please don't make things personal. This means it's not appropriate to criticize a person's attitude or behavior (no matter how unreasonable you think they are), and it's not appropriate to use demeaning or insulting language about people just because they happen not to agree with you. Ideally, every argument could be settled in amicable fashion by people having civil discussion, with appropriate citations as needed (evidence, relevant expertise, etc.) In the ideal case, if someone has a wrong idea, then presenting reasonable evidence that they're wrong would change their mind. They'd be happy to get a better understanding of how things work, and everyone wins. Alas (surprise surprise) we do not live in an ideal world, and it rarely works out that way. Sometimes a person just won't budge from their position. Yes, even if they don't actually have any evidence or relevant experience. Yes, even when presented with evidence or relevant expertise to the contrary. You could say "that's unreasonable," and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong... but people have opinions and sometimes you can't budge them. It is not helpful to get angry or dismissive when you can't persuade someone to change their opinion. That won't persuade them, and it will likely just make them more stubborn. Accordingly, please take it down a notch, folks. Some people are going to have ideas that you're convinced are very wrong, and are going to be stubborn about it. You can counter-argue, if you feel like it, but you can't force them to change their mind. But making it irate and personal solves nothing, and personal remarks are not allowed. Thank you for your understanding.

Some content has been removed due to people making personal remarks. Folks, please don't make things personal. Address the post, not the poster. It is not your place to comment on other people's attitude or behavior. If they say something you disagree with, you can respond to what they said-- but it's not okay to go after the person themselves, regardless of how much you may dislike their behavior. If you think someone is behaving so egregiously that they're violating forum rules, then by all means file a report and the moderator team will have a look. Beyond that, though, please keep the personal remarks to yourself. Thank you for your understanding.

Some jokes and trolling in incredibly poor taste have been removed, along with the responses of various (no doubt well-meaning) people who would have done better to simply report the matter and let the moderators handle things. The topic of this thread is about the layoffs at T2 and PD. It's a legitimate topic of interest to forum members here, because of our concerns about ongoing KSP2 development. That's why the thread is okay to be here, and is left open for discussion. It's not a vehicle for making mean-spirited jokes about real people's livelihoods. Furthermore, trolling is against the forum rules (specifically 2.2.n), as is spreading disinformation (2.2.h). Thank you for your understanding.

I would disagree with this, fairly strongly. I think that KSP is a game about thinking things through and planning them out. And the maneuver tool is a planning tool. Pausing the game allows for more planning. There's no reason to penalize the player. Other UI works just fine when paused. You can switch back and forth between map and camera. You can choose a target. You can toggle various controls on the ship, such as whether reaction wheels are enabled. So why single that one thing out and make it not work? It makes no sense. The game is not about "doing things really fast and if you're not fast enough, you get a penalty." This is not a twitch-reflexes game. Forcing the clock to run while you're figuring out your maneuver nodes is making it into a hurry-up game. For a game that's about thinking things through, how does taking away time to think help the player or make it more fun to play? Doing so would just make the game more of an ordeal without actually adding to the challenge. "Challenge" in KSP is generally about thinking through more difficult problems (of orbital mechanics, engineering, aerodynamics, mechanical design, etc.) It's not about rushing the player. I also think it would lead to a poor initial user experience. If a user is new to the game, it's going to take them some time to figure out how to even work that UI. Giving them an experience where "you'll die if you don't figure this out this complicated UI in the next 45 seconds" doesn't seem like it would make them want to come back to the game. Personally, I'm against it as a game option, even if the default is "can use when paused". Rationale: Features are not free. UI complexity is not free. Any feature added is additional time that some dev is going to have to spend implementing, instead of implementing something else. Every extra bit of complexity added to to the UI is a learning-curve tax that introduces clutter and makes everything else incrementally harder to find. I'm in favor of having options that are important and meaningful and really need to be there, but this doesn't feel to me like it meets that bar. I don't think it's worth the complexity that it would add to the UI, and I'd rather the devs be working on something else. In short: I think they should just make it work the way the rest of the UI works, and therefore the way the player will expect it to work. Allowing interaction while paused is a useful quality-of-life feature for users, improves consistency, and in no way diminishes the real challenges that are at the heart of KSP. That would make sense to me. The current behavior feels kinda like a bug to me, honestly. Not only is it inconsistent with everything else, but when it locks up during pause, there's no visual indication that it's dead (that's one of the problems, actually-- the user clicks on a thing, nothing happens, user thinks it's just not a clickable thing and can't figure out how to work the UI). If the devs actually meant it to be disabled, you'd think there would be some sort of visible "this is disabled" effect.

Oh, I agree that you shouldn't be able to pause the universe while in multiplayer-- that would affect other players and would not be okay. This is the same as with other multiplayer games. However, I'm talking about the single-player experience, for which I contend that it is unambiguously the correct thing to do to pause the game clock when it's up. Pretty much every single-player game I know, does this: pause the game when the menu is up. The only one I've encountered that doesn't (Satisfactory) drives me actively nuts because of this. We don't have multiplayer now. We're not going to have it for a long time yet. And even after it arrives, players will still be spending plenty of time (perhaps the majority of time?) in single-player mode. (I personally will have no use for multi-player mode, because that's not my personal cup of tea, for example.) So: I agree that multi-player would work differently. But I don't think we should let the existence (future or otherwise) of multiplayer mode be a reason to have a suboptimal experience in single-player.

Currently, if the game is paused, everything involved in the maneuver UI goes dead (is locked, read-only, can't interact with or edit). For example, player can't place a maneuver node player can't edit an existing maneuver node player can't toggle maneuver node between expanded/collapsed appearance player can't delete a maneuver node There's no reason why a player shouldn't be able to do all of those things while paused. Everything else in the game allows paused interaction-- for example, I can switch back and forth between map and flight view, I can look at the properties of parts, I can toggle settings on parts, etc. Note that, since getting maneuver nodes set up juuuust right is a fiddly process that can be time-consuming, this is actually one of the most important things to be able to do when paused. "Pause the game, do maneuver node tinkering, now go" is a thing a player should be able to do. (What makes it especially bad right now is that not only does the UI not work, but there's no visual indication that it's deactivated-- it looks as though it should work, it's just that nothing happens when you click on it. This is of especial concern to new users who may not be familiar with the UI, whose instinct is going to be "this is hard, better pause the game while I figure it out" and the confusion results because they can't tell what they're supposed to be able to click on.)

Details below, but short answer boils down to "make it work like it did in KSP1", or something pretty close to that. Right now, what the ESC key does is: Toggles the display of the game menu, regardless of context Does not pause the game, if in flight view What I contend it should do, instead: If any dismissable UI (other than the game menu) is present: Dismisses the UI. In the editor: If a part has been picked but not yet attached to a craft, cancels the action (i.e. it winks out of existence) If the game menu is currently displayed: Dismisses the game menu. If in flight view, returns the game to whatever time warp setting it was before. If none of the above is the case: Pops up the game menu, and, if in flight view, pauses the game if it wasn't already paused. Because right now, the current behavior causes several confusing and undesired behaviors that keep tripping me up: If the part info window is open and I want to dismiss it... the ESC key is how I want to do that. Instead, it pops up the game menu, which I don't need-- I will never need to interact with that menu while I'm tinkering with the properties of a part. Right now, there's no way for me to dismiss the window without moving the mouse cursor up to the little X button in the corner, which is distracting and intrusive and requires me to move the mouse away from where I want it to be. If I'm in flight and want to check something out on the game menu... there is no circumstance in which I don't want the game paused while that menu is up. Right now I have to manually pause it and then bring up the menu. If I pick a part in the editor accidentally (or pick one and then change my mind), getting rid of the darn thing is a pain-- I have to use the DELETE key, which is on the wrong side of the keyboard (I have to move my left hand way over, since my right hand is occupied with the mouse). Picking a part is an action, and I want to cancel the action, and ESC is how one cancels things. The constant metaphor, here, is that "ESC is how you cancel actions" is an overwhelmingly common UI metaphor. It's how KSP1 worked, it's how just about every game (or other software, for that matter) works. It's intuitive and instinctive. KSP2 should adhere to that and use the ESC key as the general "cancel what I'm doing" key.

Basically just what the title says. Give us a slider in the game settings somewhere that lets us set the UI scale. Right now the controls are ginormous and take up a lot of real estate. That may be appropriate and necessary when running on a smaller monitor, in order for them to be readable, but on larger monitors it's off-puttingly oversized and wastes a lot of space.

[Flight UI / VAB] The staging icon for the parachute is extremely confusing, at least for me. My first launch, I spent many frustrating minutes trying to understand "why the heck is there no staging icon for my parachute!?!?!" Turns out it's right there, but the way they've drawn it-- with a stylized capsule under a poofy fat chute cartoon-- looks to me like an engine: The capsule is the engine bell, the chute is the mounting hardware. My eyeballs saw that icon and immediately went "yeah that's an engine" and skated right over it. Even now, when I look at it, my eye is drawn more to the capsule than the chute. If the icon is for a parachute, don't include stuff-that-isn't-a-parachute in the drawing. Make the icon look more obviously and definitely like a parachute-and-nothing-but. Get rid of the capsule, draw obvious shrouds, something like that. For example, I always found the KSP1 parachute icon very easily recognizable. For example, something like this: (please excuse my crappy "art" skills)

RIGHT NOW, MANY UI CONTROLS, INCLUDING ALL TOOLTIPS, ARE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, LIKE THIS: MY SUGGESTION IS TO PUT THESE THINGS IN MIXED CASE, SUCH AS "Symmetry Mode" IN THIS EXAMPLE, AND RESERVE ALL-CAPITALS ONLY FOR THINGS THAT ACTUALLY NEED IT, SUCH AS SECTION HEADERS OR ACRONYMS. RATIONALE WHY I THINK THE CURRENT "ALL CAPS" APPROACH IS NOT OPTIMAL: UNPLEASANT. IT FEELS LIKE THE GAME IS YELLING AT ME. FOR EXAMPLE, IT'S KIND OF UNPLEASANT TO BE READING THIS TEXT NOW. LESS READABLE. Mixed case contains a mixture of tall and short characters, which gives the eye plenty of visual reference points. ALL CAPS IS A UNIFORM HEIGHT AND IS HARDER TO TAKE IN AT A GLANCE. OBSCURES MEANING. THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT LEGITIMATELY SHOULD BE IN ALL CAPS, SUCH AS ACRONYMS LIKE SAS AND RCS. IN A MIXED CASE UI, THOSE APPROPRIATELY STAND OUT AND ARE EASY TO TAKE IN AT A GLANCE. BUT WHEN THEY'RE ACCOMPANIED BY ALL-CAPS TEXT THAT DOESN'T NEED TO BE, THEY BECOME DIFFICULT TO DECIPHER. CONVERSELY, WHEN I SEE SOMETHING LIKE "APP.BAR" IN ALL CAPS, MY BRAIN INSISTS ON TRYING TO MAKE ACRONYMS OUT OF IT AND CAUSES COGNITIVE DISSONANCE ALL THE TIME. WHEREAS IF IT SAID "App Bar", THAT WOULDN'T COME UP. If for some reason there's a legitimate desire by folks to have all caps in the UI... it would be nice to at least have this as a UI settings option somewhere, so that those of us that it causes real problems for would have some recourse.

The UI is full of tooltips like this one: When displaying tooltips, there are basically three options I can think of for displaying. KSP2 is currently using the third. Instant. When the mouse goes over the control, the tooltip instantly pops up, with full text Advantage: Instantly informative. Disadvantage: Distracting (too easy to trigger accidentally or unnecessarily). Delayed. When the mouse goes over the control, nothing happens at once. But if the mouse hovers there for some timer period, then the tooltip pops up, with full text. Advantage: Unintrusive (doesn't show up unless you hover, which is typically an intentional act). Disadvantage: Slow (if the user wants the info, forces them to wait for it) Swipe-animated. When the mouse goes over the control, instantly pop up a blank tooltip with no text. Then the text gradually animates into place, "swiping" from left, like low-baud-rate text coming over a modem or something. (This is what KSP2 is doing now.) Advantage: None Disadvantage: Manages to be both distracting and slow. Triggers instantly and distractingly every time, even if you didn't need the tip... but once it does trigger, forces you to wait for the content while it swipes. Also, maybe this is just me, but the motion and animation is absolutely maddening and jarring-- it's injecting flashy motion into a scene that's otherwise fairly static, and it drags my eye away from the important stuff on the screen. It's a really cute idea, and I'm sure it sounded great on paper, and it certainly is "stylish". However, in practical terms, these animated tooltips are driving me absolutely batty. The animation serves no useful purpose, and gives them the worst of both worlds. My suggestion is, pick either the "instant" or the "delayed" model, and go with that. My personal preference is for the "delayed" model, since that's how tooltips work for virtually every UI I've ever used, and for good reason. However, even though I would like "instant" a lot less than "delayed", it would still be infinitely better than the current animated behavior, which I find a distracting nuisance.

There are buttons in the UI that don't say what their hotkeys are. For example, in the VAB, what key do I press to toggle symmetry modes? I have no idea. If I hover over the symmetry button, it just says "SYMMETRY MODE". That tells me what the UI button does, but it doesn't tell me what UI key I could press to do the same thing. What's the hotkey? I use that as an example, but this is a general comment that should be followed consistently across the UI. If a button's important enough to have a tooltip, it's probably important enough to have a hotkey, and that hotkey needs to be surfaced. How to fix: Show the hotkey in the UI tooltip. For suppose that R were the hotkey (it isn't, but I haven't been able to figure out what it actually is), it could say "SYMMETRY MODE (R)" or something like that. Without this feature, it's extremely difficult to discover what all the hotkeys are from the UI. (And if the answer is "um, there actually isn't any hotkey for that"-- surely not!-- then this suggestion becomes "you really need to add hotkeys for things.")

Strength of reaction wheels is displayed in kilonewtons, "kN". That's not a torque, that's a force-- these are completely meaningless numbers. The units of torque are force times distance, such as "meter newtons".

Some content has been redacted and/or removed. Folks, a gentle reminder to please don't make things personal. Personal remarks are never okay. It's fine to address a person's points, but please steer clear of addressing the person themselves (such as your opinion about their behavior or attitude). It never ends well. In other words, please address the post, not the poster. Thank you for your understanding.

Thread temporarily locked, pending resolution of remaining issues.

Hello @kramken, and welcome to the forums! We're glad to see that you're looking to contribute to the KSP modding community. However, there are some rules-related issues to sort out, so for the time being we've removed your download link. We'll contact you about the issues and see if we can help you get things sorted out. Welcome aboard!