Could you guys add a difficulty setting for action groups?

[S1gmoid]

I just noticed that action groups are disabled in carreer mode... It's a very intrusive change, and I personally find it rather un-fun - and I'm someone who likes installing mods for added challenge like deadly reentry... but for me, having to fiddle with the mouse in-flight is not a challenge, it's poor usability.

It reminds me of this flash game where you had to unlock better graphics and control via in-game upgrades, but that was a joke. This here is not even funny.

There is already a load of difficulty options. I'd risk adding another to toggle this shouldn't take more than 10 minutes plus QA, and it would improve the game a lot (or rather, fix a really bad decision that broke it). I'm sure there are many others who will second this.

[Kelderek]

Are you talking about the action groups that you assign from the VAB/SPH editor to do things like extend ladders, toggle engines, etc.? In career games these are unlocked by upgrading your buildings at the KSC. They should be available in science and sandbox games automatically.

[Alshain]

I agree with the OP though, locking action groups to building upgrades is a poor mechanic. Building upgrades should not limit usability and action groups are a necessity.

The way to work around this bad mechanic is to copy your craft file over to a sandbox game, set the action groups, then copy it back to your main game. I have no qualms about doing this, since it is a bad mechanic that shouldn't exist.

This is especially problematic on planes when trying to deploy flaps or switch engine modes on dual engine planes.

"Hey we are giving you this brand new engine with an afterburner and 2 with a thrust reverser, by the way you can't use any of that at the same tech tree you unlock the part, you gotta wait till your SPH is tier 3 because we can't be bothered to give you an Engine Mode basic action group. Oh and that deployed state on the control surfaces, yeah you can't use that till tier 3 either because no Flaps action group." - SQUAD

Edited November 12, 2015 by Alshain

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah... Hm. I'll be honest I'm not crazy about it either. At the very least it aught to be moved up to teir 2.

[S1gmoid]

Yeah... Hm. I'll be honest I'm not crazy about it either. At the very least it aught to be moved up to teir 2.

Regardless where they move it, it's still a bad idea. It's as if a game told you you cannot use a joystick to play until you unlock some in-game upgrade.

Since it's been implemented, I guess someone liked the thought, okay, leave it in, just add a toggle button in the difficulty settings. Like "action groups always available" under "allow stock vessels", or something like that.

Are you talking about the action groups that you assign from the VAB/SPH editor to do things like extend ladders, toggle engines, etc.? In career games these are unlocked by upgrading your buildings at the KSC. They should be available in science and sandbox games automatically.

...please don't assume that I'm a complete muppet. Of course I'm aware of that. That is my problem.

[Alshain]

I wouldn't even do that. It needs to be removed and they need to find other incentives to upgrading (really the ones we have for vessel mass/part counts/etc. are pretty good without that limit)

Like you said, you don't limit controls as a incentive to progress in the game.

[Kelderek]

...please don't assume that I'm a complete muppet. Of course I'm aware of that. That is my problem.

Sorry, your post made it sound like you thought there are no action groups at all in career. They are there, you just don't like where they are located and the steps necessary to enable them. I can get that, but your OP was not as clear, hence my question. I agree, it is lame to link them to building upgrades, it feels contrived.

[Snark]

Strongly agree that lack of action groups is a bad mechanic.

KSP has plenty of things in it that are hard. That's why it's fun. But it's not fun to make something pointlessly hard that is, in fact, far harder than it would be in real life. You're building orbit-capable spaceships, and you can't build a button that toggles a thing or group of things? Really? It's ridiculous not to have, it's a pointless annoyance rather than a real challenge.

When the game makes something difficult that would be difficult IRL, that's a fun challenge.

When it makes something difficult for no reason other than to try to be difficult, that's immersion-breaking, which is a cardinal no-no for a game like KSP.

[WinkAllKerb'']

progression curve related ? (don't bother with that @ first, learn some other stuff before, may be something like that as it tend to be far less annoying with polished design than rough one in term of attitude control)

Edited November 12, 2015 by WinkAllKerb''

[Octa]

Sooooo...if the wiki is right, you get the basic ones with the 1st and the custom ones with the 2nd upgrade?

Sounds rather fair, as advanced crafts should need a more advanced building.

There's stuff like deploying solar panels, antennas or radiators after in space. If this is time critical, you're doing something wrong. Then there's stuff like modeswitching during atmospheric flight or, toggling engines or managing intakes. For Jets/SSTOs, you need the action groups for that, sure. But why would it be "immersive" that one of the most complex things in KSP could be build and launched with less than a Lvl 3 SPH?

[razark]

Limiting the action groups is indeed a Bad Thing. It would be different if building levels unlocked new capabilities (also something I find wrong), but action groups are not new capabilities. Early aircraft had fixed landing gear because the landing gear did not have the ability to be raised, not because no one had the technology to put a switch in the cockpit.

Action groups are a way to give the player easier access to controls. Would it make sense if you had to upgrade the Main Menu Building before you could change key bindings? Having to hunt and right-click to activate an existing action is not always easy. Or possible, in the case of parts hidden inside/behind other parts. And if your ship is spinning, clicking on anything is damn near impossible. Making your user interface harder to deal with is not the same as progression.

[Snark]

Sooooo...if the wiki is right, you get the basic ones with the 1st and the custom ones with the 2nd upgrade?

Yes, that's right.

Sounds rather fair, as advanced crafts should need a more advanced building.

I totally agree. And for things that actually matter from a gameplay and spacecraft-capability perspective, totally makes sense. I'm fine with the part-limit mechanic, that's a nice idea and I like it. Building a ship that can land on the Mun when you only have 30 parts to work with is a fun challenge.

However, action groups aren't "advanced building". I'm sorry, it just totally breaks the willing-suspension-of-disbelief thing for me. Making a contraption where you can press a button and something happens is not "advanced building." It's 19th-century technology.

There's stuff like deploying solar panels, antennas or radiators after in space. If this is time critical, you're doing something wrong.

Absolutely, which is precisely my point. If I build a ship with four deployable solar panels on it, then I can deploy them with or without action groups. It's just a whole lot more tedious. You're not actually making the game harder or more challenging in any way by not giving me the action groups. You're simply injecting tedium, and it's never a good gameplay mechanic to make something tedious for the sake of tedium. Challenge = good. Tedium = bad.

Then there's stuff like modeswitching during atmospheric flight or, toggling engines or managing intakes. For Jets/SSTOs, you need the action groups for that, sure. But why would it be "immersive" that one of the most complex things in KSP could be build and launched with less than a Lvl 3 SPH?

And the way you manage that is with the tech tree. You want RAPIERS? Great! But it's way the hell up at the tail end of the tech tree and that's how you get it. "I have to do a whole lot of research and exploration before I can get the shiny fancy engine that can switch between rocket mode and airbreathing" makes perfect sense, it's a good challenge, it's good for gameplay. However, "I then can't actually push a button to switch between modes" is silly and pointless.

That particular example isn't so useful, because by the time you've got that far in the tech tree, you've undoubtedly upgraded the buildings to top-tier anyway. But the point remains: Let players have a challenge to get fancy components by climbing the tech tree. Let players have a challenge to build "complex" craft by upgrading the VAB and the SPH. But don't play around with action groups, it injects pointless tedium that's nothing but a frustration.

[klgraham1013]

KSP's career difficulty should come from getting to the next planet, not artificially hampering players.

[Snark]

KSP's career difficulty should come from getting to the next planet, not artificially hampering players.

Well said!

[katateochi]

Yes, totally agree that limiting action groups to start with is a bad mechanic.  It seems more like something that was done because it was easy to implement, rather than because it was a good game mechanic. I'd brought this up before here 

 

On 12/11/2015, 08:52:29, Octa said:

Sooooo...if the wiki is right, you get the basic ones with the 1st and the custom ones with the 2nd upgrade?

Sounds rather fair, as advanced crafts should need a more advanced building.

There's stuff like deploying solar panels, antennas or radiators after in space. If this is time critical, you're doing something wrong. Then there's stuff like modeswitching during atmospheric flight or, toggling engines or managing intakes. For Jets/SSTOs, you need the action groups for that, sure. But why would it be "immersive" that one of the most complex things in KSP could be build and launched with less than a Lvl 3 SPH?

What Snark said, and also as Alshain said you can break that game rule by either using another sandbox save or just the other construction building if you've upgraded one but not the other.  If this was a properly coded game mechanic the rule should be applied in the flight-scene not in the editor which would prevent the workaround Alshain said ("principle of last responsible moment" ftw).  But we don't want it implemented properly, we want it removed!! 

Deploying solar panels 1 by 1 is, as other have said, tedious. But it not just that it's tedious; We've all sat back and appreciated how cool a craft looks when unfurling all it's panels in unison (with setting sun glinting of it etc).  That kind of "omg look how awesome my craft is" is one of the things that makes KSP so visually appealing and is something I think new players should get to experience much earlier on in the game.

 

[Norpo]

I've never really quite understood *why* the early action group limitation is there.

I mean, action groups are mostly a quality of life thing for solar panels and the like. The only other things I've used action groups for are for spaceplanes and toggling a bunch of jets, but that's a bit of an edge-case and it could be argued that limiting that is just arbitrary. Besides, once you have that many jets, you've already upgraded your hangar to have less part limitations, which gives you action groups, so it's not even a problem..

Also, what's preventing you from just using the Abort action group for solar panels? That way you don't even need to unlock the custom ones, which is the problem with limiting controls; there's a different workaround, but that workaround probably isn't fun and you'd probably want to use the action group anyways.

Not only that but action group limiting/unlocking is shoddily implemented as others have mentioned; if you just import a craft from a Sandbox save then you can already use action groups.

Although, a similar argument could be made for the pilot controls, prograde and retrograde holding are mostly quality-of-life controls (at least, they would be, if they worked well), so that may be the kind of thing SQUAD wants in their game.