Make crew modules' "toggle lights" action part of the Lights action group by default

[Snark]

The title pretty much says it all. It seems kind of silly that I need to manually set this up in the VAB for each new ship, or else author some ModuleManager config to do it for me.

Would be a trivial fix, just an extra config line for each affected part.

[passinglurker]

what's the config line that would do that exactly? looking at stock spot lights the don't seem to have any special configuration leading me to believe the behavior is hard coded

[CaptainTurbomuffin]

Already rated 5 stars

[Alshain]

First let me say I agree.

Expanding on it, the landing gear lights should NOT be defaulted to lights, but instead the Gear action group. There is very little reason to have them on if the gear isn't down, and for those that do want them on for maybe rendezvous or something, THEY can reassign it. Overall I think that is the exception, not the rule.

Going a little further out in suggestions, I'd like to see a few new default groups that can be used in Tier 2 SPH. Toggle Flaps and Toggle Spoilers would be nice, though given the method for configuring control surfaces, there should be no default actions for them, just groups the user can work with. Those actions are almost essential for many pilots and shouldn't be restricted to Tier 3 SPH.

Edited October 18, 2015 by Alshain

[Snark]

what's the config line that would do that exactly? looking at stock spot lights the don't seem to have any special configuration leading me to believe the behavior is hard coded

Well, dang. I was just assuming that there must be a defaultActionGroup config line to control this. Looks like you're right, it must be just hard coded to use MODULE for lights. So it's even worse than I thought.

Yeah, this would be really useful to have.

Edited October 18, 2015 by Snark

[Skalou]

i disagree for the crew module light suggestion (i prefer keep the cockpit dark when flying, especially when landing), a real light to turn off when in IVA could be great however!

i agree whith Alshain on the landing gear lights,

but an empty default button for the spoilers is the same as using a number key for me. you just want a logo in the top bar?

But i would like a default group for ladders, one for solar/radiator panels and one for antenna with the 1.1 feature!

in career i find the limited number of action group just boring, it don't add difficulty ,just a waste of time to toggle the things, or mess the thing by forcing the player to use RCS group for solar pannels or other stuff.

it add a real constraint in a few cases for me, like toggling all the air intakes and jet engines whitout engaging a flat spin on a spaceplane.

[Snark]

An elegant solution that would enable a lot of what folks are requesting here: add an optional "defaultActionGroup" parameter to certain modules where it makes sense, such as ModuleAnimateGeneric. This would allow part authors and modders to make it so that particular actions will be mapped to default KSP hotkeys. Seems like a small thing that would give lots of flexibility.

[Snark]

Just wanted to post an update: I couldn't stand it any more, so I wrote a mod to do this.
 

It adds code to allow you to use ModuleManager config to designate any action from any module as having a default action group to auto-assign to.

The mod includes config for adding all cockpit lights (actually, anything with a "Toggle Lights" action) to the Light action group by default, and some optional example config for adding all deployable solar panels to Custom01 by default.

Hope folks may find it useful.