Bej Kerman

"Disrespectful to the perils of space travel" is kind of a leap though.

I'd say making life support negligence outright fatal would only slip into "more annoying than it's worth" territory.

Out of genuine curiosity, this isn't hyperbole or some kind of joke, is it?

Okay, this one's on me, I should've figured something like this would happen as soon as a real world example of the navball being moved to the left came up. Bye bye

It's not up for discussion? Well apparently it is at SpaceX, and they decided it's best in the corner. Well there are real rockets with left-mounted navballs as illustrated above. The aerospace industry is as far as you can get from personal preference. And putting the navball on the left is a decision that SpaceX agrees with so I'm not sure what your point is, besides arguing for your own personal preference being default.

People who suffer from eye problems, as valid as their problems are, are not a majority of the playerbase, same goes for people who go overzealous on ultrawide setups, so the navball being in the corner by default really isn't a problem, and again you can just move the camera if you need your vessel next to it, so it's a non issue in those two cases. Yes I can blame game designers for not making a UI work at a common resolution. I like to use my whole screen as well and that's why I think the current default should remain the default. But again, while moving the navball isn't an option, the closest thing you have got right now if your peripheral vision is an issue is to move the camera. Till the devs let you drag the UI elements around, there's not much to do besides take this workaround or leave it. -Plus the developers themselves who made this the default navball behaviour in the first place, compared to the two or three posters complaining about the current default.

Said pilot IS using the navball, that doesn't make the idea of it being in the center by default and blocking the view any less problematic! You're making up a problem, the navball being ignored, that was never relevant. So what if the pilot concentrates on the navball? The navball doesn't tell them how close they are to scraping the edges of the cargo bay and it's blocking the view that would let them see how close they are. To address another example, so what if Matt Lowne is concentrating on the navball? That doesn't make zooming out to see the ground any less irritating for him and other console players. PC users who need to use smaller monitors will suffer from this issue as well so this is still a mistake on Squad's part. I'm simply using KSP:EE to demonstrate my point and point out an area where a lack of foresight for PC users ended up hitting another player group hard. And Squad is, well, Squad, so naturally it was placed badly. You don't like the navball being to the left? Just move the camera so your vessel is closer to the navball. I mean, that's just your solution, and if you really don't want to fiddle with the camera so the navball and vessel are next to each other, that's something for you to consider. That's a non-issue for the bigger part of the playerbase, and previously mentioned people who really need both in the center of their vision can just move the camera. Right? Tell me why the navball sitting too far from the middle of your vision is a problem if for the past several days you've been telling everyone to just move the camera.

With how remarkably square the human vision is, I'm surprised 21:9 is as popular as it is, especially compared to more logical ratios like 16:9 and 4:3.

Again, you're calling a playstyle you don't align with bad. The player in question is capable of docking like this, a point you're consistently ignoring, but would have trouble doing so if the navball occupied the middle of the screen. The problem is the navball, clearly. The player is obviously not shooting themselves in the foot if they're capable of doing a docking like this with little clearance around the lander, much less behind the engine. They're being shot in the foot by the navball since that is the one thing preventing them from docking as effectively. Just to reiterate a third time, the player is completely capable of docking in this scenario. ...adapting the experience, for example, by moving it to the left for the sake of the lower resolutions consoles tended to output at? It's not the console's or the player's fault the navball is in the middle and being blown up to display clearly at a low resolution, all by default. Developers tested this and didn't once ask "maybe we should move the navball to the left so players don't have to contend with this at the same time they're coming to grips with our janky control scheme".

Your way of doing things is not "doing things properly". It's certainly not the only good way of doing things. It's merely your way of doing things, and that's fine until you start parading other ways of playing as bad or daft. If a player is 100% capable of an improv docking with less than 2 meters of clearance between the lander and the walls of a cargo bay, but they're impeded by the placement of the navball, that's not a problem with the player's skills, because they're quite clearly a capable pilot. It's purely a problem with the navball and you shouldn't be quick to bash players who play the way they want because you want to avoid fairly addressing situations where the navball being in the middle would hinder their gameplay experience. The degree to which Lowne had to zoom out, just to see the slither of ground between the bottom of the lander and the top of the navball, is not "a bit". It's frankly absurd how small his landers got on screen during his console playthrough, and probably worse for Lowne himself since he's used to 4k monitors. So... the KSP 1 navball is a wasteful bloaty mess, per the Lowne example? Again, per Master39, if bloat was the problem, Matt Lowne would not have had a difficult time getting the ground immediately below is lander into view.

Or maybe you're just not used to 16:9. The game was obviously developed for 16:9, it's an industry standard ratio. Plus, I'd wager 16:9 4k is better than whatever your setup is meant to be since it gives you more vertical room (useful for landings) and also doesn't give an absurd amount of screen space to the very extreme edge of your vision.

It isn't. It's an instrument. In real life it's your view, but in KSP its purpose has always only been to supplement the view from the camera. It doesn't tell you your alignment, and even if it did it would not tell you how close you are to scraping a structural element. The game for making you zoom out. A. Simply being aligned with the docking port does not give the engine any more clearance in the example so it's still helpful to be able to see the lander as it docks to make sure you don't scrape anything. B. I sincerely can't believe I have to explain this: KSP is an arcade-ish game, not an industry grade simulator, and it's just hyperbolic to expect players, old or new, to plan missions and procedures to the same degree as real life space agencies. The navball does not tell you if your engine is about to collide with the back of the cargo bay. That job belongs to the part of the screen it would block were it in the middle. Because why dedicate less pixels to showing the lander, thus making it more difficult to see? I thought you were considering accessibility? It's much better to just move the navball. By your token, is it the players' fault for the UI rendering poorly, because they're not using the exact monitors the developers used during development? Just use the same monitors, right?

They are addressable, even if it hurts your case because it exposes you to situations in the game where you need the navball on screen without it obstructing your view. Again you're back to blaming the player instead of simply addressing the player's situation. Here's an example, maybe the player is docking a lander inside a tight cargo bay and needs to see the clearance around the lander - and the navball being in the middle would prevent them from making sure they don't scrape the engine on the back of the cargo bay. Are you going to blame the player for daring to save construction resources on smaller cargo bays, or maybe, just maybe, having the navball on the bottom is detrimental. It doesn't matter if the ground is seemingly (keyword: seemingly) flat, it'd still be irritating to only be able to see a few feet below your lander like in the example from Lowne's gameplay. It is, though I wouldn't want the developers to change the current default in an attempt to reduce complaints.

Using prefab parts as a strike against robotics is like using prebuilt LEGO sets as a strike against having a giant tub of bricks to do with as you please. Fair enough, though the game's not going to be in this state forever.

Is this one of those roving goalposts? The pilots are going to be looking at their screen, not out the windows. The screen is effectively their FOV and it's off to the side.

I am pretty sure there's an advanced tweakable in the stock game that lets things deploy while stowed.

How are they clunky? I mean, how would they negatively affect gameplay for you? Just don't use them if you don't like them, for everyone else they're incredibly useful (plus real spacecraft rely a lot on robotics)

Nothing says "there was a tangible sense of momentum" like revamping (not even all-) the part textures, doing a bad job and falling behind ReStock, instead of prioritising bugs and gameplay features. And barely being able to pump out fireworks for the last major update ever.

They can't even trust real life rockets to agree 100% of the time

So... you don't care that the navball covers a horribly large portion of the screen? Completely irrelevant. They received backing from a large company and had every chance to move the navball to the left by default. It doesn't take an industry veteran to think "Wow, this UI element covers too much screen space. It's best off in a corner". No A flat style would've been better but that's all I'm giving. The overall layout is still lightyears ahead of KSP 1. You're blaming Matt Lowne for the default placement of the navball? Back to this. Aviation 101 is not gaming 101, and again, look at how little space the navball gave Lowne to view the ground under his vessel.

????? So we can talk about the KSP 2 UI not handling certain resolutions well (for the record: when it comes to the pixelated style scaling improperly, yeah, I agree that is a problem), but as soon as we discuss the KSP 1 UI becoming outright obstructive at certain common UI scales, especially those you can expect console players to play at, it's "[not] too fair"? Not to mention, claiming "if you make it the whole screen, I agree it's obstructive" which, purposefully or not, implies people who play at these UI scales would do so intentionally only to make their experience worse. I think it's completely fair to cite this example. People playing at lower resolutions or with their monitor across the room like in any living room setup is not unheard of, and if anything, it's frankly not fair to pull the rug from under my argument as soon as any criticism of UI scaling poorly blows KSP 1's way. I guess this is a convoluted way of saying: I don't think it's too fair to the discussion to excuse Squad with "the game was designed for and tested at a certain resolution", as if it isn't standard practice to ensure UIs scale well between 720p and 3840p and super incompetent on Squad's part to not do so! Matt Lowne would not configure his game purposefully to make his console experience even worse, full stop. Players playing with the UI this big is not something that never ever happens and is not something devs shouldn't try to account for when coming up with layouts for their UIs. I'll hold Squad fully accountable for placing the navball in the middle so that players have to zoom way out to see the ground below their landers.

Coming back here cause I wanted to add to Master39's point, that even if the navball was bloated, it's not an issue because it's in the corner of the screen. You also never addressed the screencap I sent of Lowne's gameplay (showing that bloat being a problem if there is any is 100% dependent on the navball being in the middle) and Master39's point that "most people talking about it being in the way are already thinking about the much smaller KSP1 version" so I'm interested in seeing your 2c there as well.

Good for you Unfortunately, not everyone plays with the same UI scale and monitors - this is what Matt Lowne's playthrough of KSP Enhanced Edition looked like. Look at how far he needed to zoom out in order to see the ground immediately beneath the lander.