Large Info Dump

[Lewie]

1 minute ago, RealKerbal3x said:

Let's not get too worried about that yet. We're still over a year from release. This article just gives a cursory glance at the arrangement of the UI, which could change by the time the game releases. Hopefully there's a way to move the UI elements around as you see fit.

Also, note that it doesn't actually say 'time zoom' anywhere on the UI. That's just on the captions the article added - we don't know if that's actually the term used in-game. This is mostly speculation at this point, but I wouldn't worry too much. I'd reckon a 'Classic UI' mod will appear within a few days after the game's release, anyway.

Only problem is that I play on console....

Maybe I’ll try giving life to the potato of a pc I have just for ksp and work. 

Yeah, I think I’m going to do that. I want to stay ip to date with updates and get mode, so I’m going to be done with console with ksp2 

[SarreUnion]

Full transcript (including missing pieces in the posted images) :

Spoiler

Introduction

I don’t know much about astrophysics, aerodynamics, or anything else to do with rocket science, but I do know how to tell when someone is trying very hard to avoid saying the words “kerbal orgy”. New studio Intercept, which has taken the reins of KSP, is busy crafting a sequel coming next year, that include intergalactic travel, multiplayer and helpful tutorials for science-challenged players like me. Reading between the lines of my first look at Kerbal Space Program 2, the kerbals themselves are getting busy too.

Over the course of two days I spoke with the dev team about what’s new in Kerbal Space program 2, what’s changed, and just as importantly, what’s not changed, to preserve the wonderful sense of accomplishment and discovery that defined one of PC gaming’s greatest experiences. At no point did anyone say these little green explorers are so excited about intergalactic travel that they throw a spontaneous space orgy, but I’m here to tell you it’s most definitely happening.

And honestly, I’m thrilled about it. It’s hard, lonely work going where no kerbal has gone before, and they deserve to celebrate – especially because that sweet, sweet space nooky is a key part of Kerbal Space Program 2’s vastly expanded progression into the unknown.

The Big Boom

Ext: Space. The camera pans across a desert landscape, the faint flow of starlight refracting through a layer of atmosphere at the horizon. Stirring synth chords and a bass drum aren't quite repoducing Also sprach Zarathustra, but the tone is the same. Mysterious. Ominous? The vibe is unmistakably 2001. 

Then, peeking out over the edge of a cliff, we see it - a colony on the dusty orange surface, futuristic apartment buildings on a lattice of steel support beams flanked by rows of solar panels and greenhouses. A long runway for space planes suggests how fresh supplies and colonists will reach this output on the Planet Duna, while the ramp at the end of the runway immediately makes me want to ruin the ambiance by strapping a rocket to a rover and seeing how far it could jump. The Kerbals, I think, would certainly understand.

Flying to the Mun and beyond is just the beginning of your progression through the solar system and, eventually, the galaxy. To reach those far-flung stars, you'll now be able to establish orbital and planetary colonies, staging grounds for the next leg of your cosmic journey.

"[Colonies are] capable of producing colonists through a method that we will not describe, for everyone's sake, after something that the player initiates called a 'boom even'", says lead designer Shana Markham. Throughout Kerbal's new career mode, which the developers have nicknamed 'adventure mode', making discoveries and unlocking new technologies will trigger these boom events, which kick off various effects across your civilization. In a colony's nursery module, for example, that means making new colonists. "You know, discoveries make kerbals happy," Markham says.

The goal of adventure mode is to provide a far more ambitious campaign for players to embark on, building ships powerful enough to leave the solar system. The structure will include specific missions, but creative director Nate Simpson says these will feel more "compelling" than some of the first game's missions, which would direct you to fly to a specific latitude/longitude and trigger a part on your ship. "Those felt grindy. We're going out of our way to make the mission goals for adventure mode feel meaningful: real firsts that feel unique relative to every other goal in the game."

Simpson says adventure mode has a lot in common with the first game's science mode, which gave you unlimited funds but made you earn science points to advance the tech tree. In KSP2, the missions will be there for players who want them, but you can also set your own goals. "You'll begin to collect science and trigger boom events as you explore what's out there," Simpson says.The campaign is "explicitly designed to be non-punitive" so you'll never reach a fail state where you've run out of money and have to start over. Colonies won’t require tons of micromanagement. If you leave one in a dangerous state, without enough power or food, it’ll simply underperform. You can ignore it and keep on building that next rocket – the one sure to be you masterpiece once you solve that little ‘exploding on the Launchpad’ problem.

It's rocket science

The more time you’ve spent in the original Kerbal’s rocket building module, the more likely you’ll gasp, hand covering your mouth to ward off surprise like it’s an alien facehugger, when you see Kerbal Space Program 2’s new tools. The interface is much refined at a glance, there’s a new toolbar for finer control over objects you’ve selected, and parts within categories are now arranged into size tiers, which was a necessity for the “much higher part count in KSP2”, says Simpson. “In early playtesting, the game became ‘find the part you’re looking for’”.

The truly exciting features tales a bit longer to spot. Once you start building with a part, those size categories will show you other parts that will fit on your rocket. There’s a painter palette that let you color your ship, customization that will be essential for multiplayer. You can still rotate the camera 360 degrees, but you can also enter Blueprint mode, which gives you a perfectly ‘flat’ view to facilitate easy symmetry.

And – this is the megaton – you can now build multiple assemblies in the same workspace, rather than having to build a whole rocket in one go. “You can have a bunch of different highly complex elements that are free-floating” says Simpson. “Then combining them with the symmetry tools, you can make, for example, a radially mounted booster that has a lot of complexity in itself, and then attach or detach it willy nilly.”

I watched Markham build a rocket, then a booster that would add the fuel and thrust needed to escape Kerbin’s atmosphere. She simply highlighted the sub-assembly, clicked the hotkey to toggle three-way radial symmetry, and then attached three identical boosters to her ship.

You save entire workspace instead of a specific ship, so you can create variants, with parts and boosters that are easy to swap out for different types of missions. This will come in especially handy as you start building colonies – you’ll have to haul an unwieldy ‘founder module’ and other supplies to the build site, which will require solving a whole different set of physics problems.

The Vehicle Assembly Building has one more huge feature up its sleeve: a built-in trip planner, inspired by community members who created intricate charts to show the potential velocity a rocket will need to reach targets like the Mun or Duna. These became so popular even the developers themselves used them. “I’ll be glad to not have a printout posted on my wall” says Markham.

For many Kerbal players, the early hours of the game are pent building a rocket and failing to reach you destination, without necessarily understanding why. “This is a way to tighten up that part of the iteration loop, by giving you real time information about how far your vehicle can go in its current configuration” says Nate Simpson. The trip planner lets you set a destination and show the best-case velocity for each stage of you rocket. As you swap out boosters and other parts, you can see how that will affect just how far you can fly.

‘Potential’ is the key word there, because the trip planner won’t stop you from building spectacularly unstable, explosive rockets. Simpson says that with each addition KSP2’s developers have tried to distinguish between “constructive failure” and “frustrating failure”. The new tools are meant to ensure failures allow you to learn something (or at least laugh at Jebediah Kerman’s horrified face as your rocket corkscrews back to the ground at a thousand miles per hour).

“We don’t want you to make the same mistake twice” Simpson says. “We want you to make a lot of different mistakes”. And now when you make those mistakes, KSP 2 will have a lot more help to offer.

Class in session

Truly getting into Kerbal Space Program inevitably means spending hours delving into YouTube videos on rocket science and the game itself. Even if you have a physics degree, there's still a steep learning curve to understanding how the hell to work Kerbal's interface. KSP2 fixes some obvious oversights and make the user interface a whole more elegant.

Flight tools are now clustered together in more logical ways, with navigation on the left and time controls in the centre, a place of prominence that reflects how important fast forwarding will be as you start launching long interstellar journeys. There's now a pause button, which I fervently hope gets a tool-tip that says 'DONT'T PANIC'.

Pausing will be one of the main ways players access KSP2's greatly expanded tutorials, which include a mixture of interactive tutorials to guide you through using interface elements, and animations that give you a crash course in rocketry. The example I saw adeptly explained high thrust and low thrust rocket engines with a pair of kerbals biking up a steep hill (see left).

"We're trying to create a system where the player comes to the tutorial with the desire to gain a specific category of information," says Simpson. The tutorials will be context-aware, so if you pause after leaving the atmosphere, for example, you'll be able to easily pull up a tutorial on how to execute a gravity turn to escape Kerbin's orbit. You'll perform that maneuver in 'VR space', then go back to your real rocket and put what you learned to good use. Hopefully.

"The big thing for me is that these are actually bite-sized, so you have a whole tutorial section about going to the Mun, but it's broken up into a large number of subsections, so you can learn and practice a specific piece," says Markham. And the game will make suggestions, too. When a launch inevitably goes awry, the post-flight report can highlight a tutorial based on what went wrong, so you'll learn as you go.

Given how much of the joy of Kerbal Space Program lies in discovery and personal achievement, there is a risk in over-explaining. The dev team is well aware of that pitfall because they've already stumbled over it. In early tutorial iterations they leaned too far into telling players how to play - the most straightforward tutorial, after all, is to tell someone exactly what rocket parts they need to reach their goal - but realized that the gratification comes from figuring it out yourself. "The important thing is to provide people with puzzle pieces and informational context, but don't tell them how to make the rocket. Concepts, not prescriptions," Simpson says.

Kerbal Space Program 2 is clearly going to be a far easier game to start playing, but the changes to the UI and a proper campaign mode should excite its loyal kerbonauts, too. What I'm really dying to know - and unfortunately saw precious little of - is what awaits outside the Kerbol System, and what it's going to be like exploring it with friends in multiplayer.

Space walk with me

I learned precious little about just how big Kerbal Space Program 2 truly is, but I did come away from two days of interview with some clues. The dev team is around 30 people and still growing, and that's not including support from publisher Private Division's QA team, who the developers praised as being seasoned Kerbal fans and very helpful. It's easily the biggest team Kerbal has ever had behind it.

The ships you’ll eventually be able to build are immense. Shana Markham showed me a space station with an interstellar craft docked at it, and that ship wouldn’t be possible to construct on the planet’s surface (its engine would take up most of the Vehicle Assembly Building, which places hard limits on the size of whatever you’re building). And I’d be more than surprised if the dev team isn’t keeping even grander ships with more advanced parts, secret for now.

The same goes for the planets you’ll explore and the challenges you’ll face landing on them in adventure mode. Simpson says they don’t want to mess with the Kerbol system, which fans know intimately at this point, so much of the environmental work must be going into other parts of the galaxy. There’s also an entirely new game system, called delivery routes, built around connecting your colonies.

“We’ve heard this concern many times from fans, and it’s something we wanted to address really hard early on in the design, ‘Once I’ve successfully performed a resource delivery between two distant locations, I’m not going to want to do it again’. So you establish those footholds and then let them run automatically.” Simpson says. “The thing that makes it an interesting experience, as you’re setting up all these individual resource collection operations, is the puzzle of successfully landing on and extracting the resources on every celestial body is ideally different enough that you’re having to solve a new set of physics problems with a new vehicle design. That’s even more the case with the new celestial bodies we’re bringing in on some of the other star systems”.

There are multiple solar systems, then, and tech and science advancements that continue well into the intergalactic phase of the game. With mod support already promised, it’s easy to imagine Kerbal Space Program 2 lasting for years after launch, even before updates roll out (and launch is definitely just the beginning of the team’s plans). But how does multiplayer fit in? The developers wouldn’t tell me if it’s going to be small scale or more massively multiplayer. But while talking about colonies, Simpson did reveal that “in co-op, if you and your friends have established a base in a certain spot and are independently bringing different kind of resources to store at that base, then you’ll be seeing a lot of people coming and going”.

I want to know more about Kerbal 2 desperately. But at the same time I want to forget what I’ve already learned until it’s out in 2021 and I can play it, because that’s sense of discovery really is the magic of Kerbal. Even more than the now UI, the tutorials, the colonies and everything else I was, it’s the line from Nate Simpson that I keep thinking about, which makes me confident this team understands the spirit of Kerbal that lives underneath all the whiny new toys. “One of the things I loved about my first experience with KSP1 was how quiet a universe it was” he says. “And how I had to come to it”.

Let’s see what’s out there.

 

[DStaal]

2 minutes ago, Lewie said:

Only problem is that I play on console....

Maybe I’ll try giving life to the potato of a pc I have just for ksp and work. 

Yeah, I think I’m going to do that. I want to stay ip to date with updates and get mode, so I’m going to be done with console with ksp2 

They know they want to release a modable game, and they know they're going to release to console.  Newer generations of consoles support at least some mods.

I suspect they'll take that into account, and have some system where mods can be used with consoles.  Don't worry about it yet.

[Lewie]

2 minutes ago, DStaal said:

They know they want to release a modable game, and they know they're going to release to console.  Newer generations of consoles support at least some mods.

I suspect they'll take that into account, and have some system where mods can be used with consoles.  Don't worry about it yet.

Really? Dang, where’d you hear that?

It’s just that the controls for console can be really janky at times, even after you’ve got ‘em all down. Only thing that the console beats pc is flying planes. At least in my experience, our experiences all vary

[Guest]

Honestly just at first glance it's obvious that some serious UI design time got into designing that interface, and that's more than anything we can say about KSP1 UI that more or less grew organically into place, the critics simply come from multiple years of being used to KSP1 UI.

[Jmcgee1125]

If anyone wants to mess around with the UI for yourself, I've converted it into a file with layers for you. I've also removed the red highlights, so it's easier to tell how everything fits without the layering.

You'll need paintdotnet to edit (sorry Photoshoppers), available at getpaint.net. Windows only, sadly.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iozdCXSO-hb6rzextCagIBPqlHXH_a0y/view?usp=sharing

EDIT: GIMP version (xcf file): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VtLIoSiLlQEMwKpbf93DuIDsTDeLzC_n/view?usp=sharing

Edited May 29, 2020 by Jmcgee1125

[Spaceception]

16 hours ago, SpaceFace545 said:

Im going to quit this whole franchise if I see one of them, they're like a parasite. Starts as one but then he tells his friend  and then a youtuber starts to talk about it and then they're everywhere

Seriously? I don't see a problem with that. If they're causing trouble, then the moderators will kick them off. If they're just kids playing a game, and interacting on the forums, what's the trouble? Kids getting into space exploration? We can't have that!

 

Also, I remember getting into this game when Jacksepticeye was playing it frequently. I was a teenager. Pewdiepie (a gamer, and the biggest youtuber) has already played at least once, as have several other gaming channels with younger audiences. Are they everywhere right now?

Edited May 29, 2020 by Spaceception

[SpaceFace545]

6 minutes ago, Spaceception said:

Seriously? I don't see a problem with that. If they're causing trouble, then the moderators will kick them off. If they're just kids playing a game, and interacting on the forums, what's the trouble? Kids getting into space exploration? We can't have that!

No not fornite kids, they bring unwanted hype 

[Tonas1997]

I hope we don't end up without a proper career mode with funds, goddamnit.

[The Aziz]

I'm reading this thread, and... oh gods, what happened to these people?
Next time you're all gonna say that you're not getting this game because it doesn't have this:

I won't quote anyone from the last four pages. But did anyone actually study GUI?

Current KSP1 interface is an inconsistent mess (not saying it's bad, as it somehow works for the game), scattered around the screen. this bit here, that bit there. We're getting to the age of much bigger monitors than we had a decade ago, and I certainly don't want to turn my head around to see my MET or current contract on the other side of the screen. Everything that is important should be in one place, whenever possible. So it is going to be. Many people move the navball to the side even today, ask them, maybe thay have an interesting answer. Time controls are at the bottom, nearby other parts of the interface since you're going to use them quite often, and Kerbal portraits, as probably the least important, are far on the top. You're not going to spend much time looking there anyway. And so, much from the central part of the screen is free from GUI. And that's good, because your ship is there, and you don't want it obscured by stupid navball.

And I don't want to start about the style, because it was good, but time has changed. What's wrong with simplicity? Overuse of colors and effects looked good, 10 years ago. So we won't get ol' metal (gray n orange) borders, like on Apollo 11 console or whatever, we're getting some smooth, modern touches like on Dragon 2. The future.

And last by not least, just because you're USED TO something, does not make something new bad from the start. I wonder what you would say if there wasn't a KSP 1, and this was the first game in the franchise, being presented before release like any other.

/rant

 

Oh sorry one more thing. Somebody said "customer is always right" and I just wanted to point out that our devs also were just customers, with ideas, but now they have the power to bring these ideas to life.

Edited May 29, 2020 by The Aziz

[DMagic]

Instead of arguing about how the new UI isn't like the old UI, maybe we should look at some of the interesting parts of it.

It looks like they are keeping the dV style readouts on the staging panels, which is good, that seems like the most intuitive place to have that info. 

The staging panels also look like they have some kind of color coding.

Also, this thing looks interesting. Like it could be used for the maneuver node gizmo as well as the orientation indicator. And it might not necessarily show the same orientation as the navball.

[DStaal]

1 hour ago, Lewie said:

Really? Dang, where’d you hear that?

It’s just that the controls for console can be really janky at times, even after you’ve got ‘em all down. Only thing that the console beats pc is flying planes. At least in my experience, our experiences all vary

They list two consoles on the KSP2 announcement page, and I know from let's play videos online that at least some current console games have at least some mods.  That's all my information here.

[Jacke]

1 hour ago, The Aziz said:

I'm reading this thread, and... oh gods, what happened to these people?
Next time you're all gonna say that you're not getting this game because it doesn't have this:

I won't quote anyone from the last four pages. But did anyone actually study GUI?

Quit it with the negative waves, man.  We're all wanting to help here.  That means respectful pushback.  Constructive criticism.  Which we're doing.

From the minimal pictures we got, I have studied the GUI.

I'm not saying the current GUI is perfect.  I'm not saying what we know of the future GUI is doomed.

What I am saying is that the KSP 2 GUI still needs a lot of work.  And that work would be easier if that GUI could be customized in feature position and colour.  Here's one important reason why that I hadn't thought of before:

What about colour blind people?  Of various types?  Any colour selection that doesn't consider them, at least allowing the colours to have some customization, easily, is flawed.

And despite there being about a year and a half to go, getting movement on these issues now is important.  Otherwise it's a few months to release and those vital changes can't be done.

I'm worried about the game modes being cut down to this one "Adventure" mode.  And a sandbox mode I assume.  KSP 2 should be roughly as good as KSP is in features, preferably with improvements.  The current KSP career is very lacking, especially Funding mode.  But they're workable.  Cut those down in KSP 2 and that is not roughly as good as KSP.

Edited May 29, 2020 by Jacke

[SpaceFace545]

1 minute ago, Jacke said:

Quit it with the negative waves, man.  We're all wanting to help here.  That means respectful pushback.  Constructive criticism.  Which we're doing.

From the minimal pictures we got, I have studied the GUI.

I'm not saying the current GUI is perfect.  I'm not saying what we know of the future GUI is doomed.

What I am saying is that the KSP 2 GUI still needs a lot of work.  And that work would be easier if that GUI could be customized in feature position and colour.  Here's one important reason why that I hadn't thought of before:

What about colour blind people?  Of various types?  Any colour selection that doesn't consider them, at least allowing the colours to have some customization, easily, is flawed.

And despite there being about a year and a half to go, getting movement on these issues now is important.  Otherwise it's a few months to release and those vital changes can't be done.

I'm worried about the game modes being cut down to this one "Adventure" mode.  And a sandbox mode I assume.  KSP 2 should be roughly as good as KSP is in features, preferably with improvements.  The current KSP career is very lacking, especially Funding mode.  But they're workable.  Cut those down in KSP 2 and that is not roughly as good as KSP.

I’m going to be blatant and to the point, the UI sucks. They thought on how to make more room but they just put everything in the corner into a big inconsistent pile. Like pushing all of your clothing into your closet floor instead of putting it away properly. And also time zoom, that makes zero sense whatsoever, it’s time warp, warp means to speed up, zoom means to increase a relative scale.

[Bej Kerman]

2 hours ago, The Aziz said:

I'm reading this thread, and... oh gods, what happened to these people?
Next time you're all gonna say that you're not getting this game because it doesn't have this:

I won't quote anyone from the last four pages. But did anyone actually study GUI?

Current KSP1 interface is an inconsistent mess (not saying it's bad, as it somehow works for the game), scattered around the screen. this bit here, that bit there. We're getting to the age of much bigger monitors than we had a decade ago, and I certainly don't want to turn my head around to see my MET or current contract on the other side of the screen. Everything that is important should be in one place, whenever possible. So it is going to be. Many people move the navball to the side even today, ask them, maybe thay have an interesting answer. Time controls are at the bottom, nearby other parts of the interface since you're going to use them quite often, and Kerbal portraits, as probably the least important, are far on the top. You're not going to spend much time looking there anyway. And so, much from the central part of the screen is free from GUI. And that's good, because your ship is there, and you don't want it obscured by stupid navball.

And I don't want to start about the style, because it was good, but time has changed. What's wrong with simplicity? Overuse of colors and effects looked good, 10 years ago. So we won't get ol' metal (gray n orange) borders, like on Apollo 11 console or whatever, we're getting some smooth, modern touches like on Dragon 2. The future.

And last by not least, just because you're USED TO something, does not make something new bad from the start. I wonder what you would say if there wasn't a KSP 1, and this was the first game in the franchise, being presented before release like any other.

/rant

 

Oh sorry one more thing. Somebody said "customer is always right" and I just wanted to point out that our devs also were just customers, with ideas, but now they have the power to bring these ideas to life.

Thank you!!! 

[The Aziz]

24 minutes ago, SpaceFace545 said:

I’m going to be blatant and to the point, the UI sucks. They thought on how to make more room but they just put everything in the corner into a big inconsistent pile. Like pushing all of your clothing into your closet floor instead of putting it away properly.

You have everything you need in one place, which is intuitive (and ergonomic, reduced eye movement), and that's bad? So you prefer like it is now, some of the clothes in the closet, and some in the kitchen upstairs?

The only difference, except for obvious new style in this particular example is that altimeter isn't elsewhere, but together with all other crucial information about your position in space.

[Tonka Crash]

The style of the UI doesn't really matter much to me.  I can adapt to a different look. What I think is a huge mistake is moving all the flight instruments to the bottom left corner. These should be front and center not shove off to the side.  

The Orientation Controller is a waste of space and redundant information to the Navball, unless it's supposed to replace the SAS controls. Where are the maneuver node and target controls? Kerbal portraits are not that important to me, ever. Leave them in a corner. Same with the time warp indicator. It's not critical to the task of flying.  If you are going to "fix" the Kerbal portraits, figure out a system to make find a specific Kerbal out of a group of 40 on a ship easy.

A pause button was a needed control?  Hitting the 'esc' key has always been fine in most games I play.

I started KSP on the Xbox and hated the UI. Tried it on the PC and liked it enough to buy my first PC for gaming in a decade. I kind of wonder if the guys designing and approving the KSP2 UI ever played this game with anything other than MechJeb in the sandbox. If the UI turns out to be a mess, I doubt I'll spend much time in KSP2. 

The Adventure mode sounds like a step in the wrong direction to replace contracts.  I tend to play each of my games with the same loose goals, but contracts add a randomness to how each of my games evolve over time.  Early career when cash is restricted tends to force me to be more efficient and try things I'd otherwise skip, like airplanes. It Contracts is a huge improvement to me over Science mode. The Adventure mode sounds like it's going to just be a series of check boxes to accomplish the next "first" on a preprogrammed progression to the next "first".  Where's the randomness that make replays feel fresh?

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

The Orientation Controller is a waste of space and redundant information to the Navball, unless it's supposed to replace the SAS controls.

I think it's pretty obvious (at least for me) that it does replace them.

 

7 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

Where are the maneuver node and target controls?

It's an assembly spawned directly in orbit (the same Mun rocket you see in the trailer), I don't think they had any maneuver node planned in that screenshot.

 

4 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

Same with the time warp indicator. It's not critical to the task of flying. 

Knowing at which warp you are at any moment it's a critical information and the indicator doubles as control.

 

10 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

A pause button was a needed control?  Hitting the 'esc' key has always been fine in most games I play.

Esc stops the game and open the "save/exit/option" menu, "pasue" doesn't stop the game, it's a 0x warp, it's a pretty standard feature in any other simulation-management games that have time warp, I'm surprised nobody asked for one before. 

Hit pause, set up the fuel transfer you need to do, hit play and continue doing that gravity turn on that unstable rocket. 

Hit pause, start the experiment precisely on the waypoint, hit play and continue to fly at supersonic speed over the area.

Hit pause, shut down two engines at the opposite ends of the wings, hit play and continue to fly with no asymmetric flame-out.

The more I think about it the more I want one now for KSP1 (does somebody know a mod for this?).

 

17 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

What I think is a huge mistake is moving all the flight instruments to the bottom left corner. These should be front and center not shove off to the side.  

The navball is bulky, in the center of the screen is going to hide something crucial at the wrong moment (when landing perhaps?) and that's a problem that even KSP1 recognize by having a button to close it and by having an option to move it on the side, moving it in a corner during a major redesign it's only natural the rest of the flight crucial infos just follows the navball to have all of them in one place instead of spread out to the whole border.

 

25 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

I kind of wonder if the guys designing and approving the KSP2 UI ever played this game with anything other than MechJeb in the sandbox.

Nate Simpson, the creative director, has something like 3 or 4000 hours on the game, and hearing him talk about the design and the challenges of developing KSP2 it's pretty obvious that he really has that kind of knowledge of the game.

 

28 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

The Adventure mode sounds like a step in the wrong direction to replace contracts.  I tend to play each of my games with the same loose goals, but contracts add a randomness to how each of my games evolve over time.  Early career when cash is restricted tends to force me to be more efficient and try things I'd otherwise skip, like airplanes. It Contracts is a huge improvement to me over Science mode. The Adventure mode sounds like it's going to just be a series of check boxes to accomplish the next "first" on a preprogrammed progression to the next "first".  Where's the randomness that make replays feel fresh?

The only think we know about the Progression/Adventure mode of KSP2 is that it will replace Career and Science. The other details here and there are too sparse and/or not precise enough to draw any conclusion.

Unifying the two is IMOH a very big step in the right direction, which is to redesign everything from scratch all at the same time instead of growing it into place during a long period of time with no long term plans.

Keep also in mind the new scope of the game: Colonies, extraplanetary launchpads and interstellar exploration, removing or changing the modes that allows you to do everything without even leaving Kerbin (Science) or the mode that could actually block you there (Career) and replacing it with something that supports your most ambitious plans and rewards you for going out there and setting up big networks of infrastructure and colonies its just good game design.

[Lewie]

So you guys think we'll still be able to select the sas modules? Like we’ll still be able to hold retorgrade, etc? 

[TheNeutralCat]

The UI, from what I've seen, seems a lot less... complex?
I kind of like the more "sci-fi" look of things, but... Idk, it seems more like driving the Cyclops from Subnautica than it is like flying a spacecraft.

Then again, I can't imagine what kind of stress the devs must be under, having to craft something new, have it be faithful to KSP, but also have it appeal to the community.

In any case, yeah, I don't like the new UI that much.

Edit: Wait, no, I take that back, I actually really like how the staging and time "zoom" looks. I just dislike the navball as it stands now.

Edited May 29, 2020 by TheNeutralCat

[HvP]

1 hour ago, SpaceFace545 said:

warp means to speed up, zoom means to increase a relative scale

If we are being semantically pedantic...

"Warp" means to twist or bend a shape, such as warped space-time. In fact, the term "warp speed" actually refers to the bending of space, not time specifically.

And "zoom" also means to move very quickly, as in to "zoom down the race track."

But more to the topic. I think that the graphic design choice is fine, for my taste. I would however like to keep the top and bottom center of the screen clear of obstruction for visibility. The first thing I do in a new game is to move the navball over to the left. And while the time controls at the bottom are much less intrusive, I would maybe opt for an auto-hide and hover pop-up action for them.

Edited May 29, 2020 by HvP

[Pthigrivi]

46 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

What I think is a huge mistake is moving all the flight instruments to the bottom left corner. These should be front and center not shove off to the side.  

Im not sure. Years back I owned a Toyota Echo. It was ghastly looking but was fun to drive and had great milage. Anyway. It had the speedometer and all the other instruments over the center column where you'd expect the radio to be. It was weird to get used to but in time I found it helped me keep my eye on the road because I didn't all that stuff in my face. It was the same glance to look at it, but it was an off-to-the-side glance. The counter to that is most of the time Im flying Im basically focused on the nav ball and map-space entirely and only glancing at the vessel itself to stage and see if Im on fire. 
 

52 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

The Orientation Controller is a waste of space and redundant information to the Navball, unless it's supposed to replace the SAS controls. Where are the maneuver node and target controls? Kerbal portraits are not that important to me, ever. Leave them in a corner. Same with the time warp indicator. It's not critical to the task of flying. 

Someone mentioned this could make for a decent maneuver-tweak widget. I'd be happier with that. And agreed on your other points.
 

55 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

A pause button was a needed control?  Hitting the 'esc' key has always been fine in most games I play.

Yeah I mean, it's whatever to me. Same with the "Go" button... seems like brand new players don't get the spacebar it's weird. One thing Im wondering about a real "pause" is can I zoom out and check the rest of the solar systme map or switch to other vessels? Can I go noodle in the VAB and leave time stopped in the rest of the universe? 
 

58 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

The Adventure mode sounds like a step in the wrong direction to replace contracts.  I tend to play each of my games with the same loose goals, but contracts add a randomness to how each of my games evolve over time.  Early career when cash is restricted tends to force me to be more efficient and try things I'd otherwise skip, like airplanes. It Contracts is a huge improvement to me over Science mode. The Adventure mode sounds like it's going to just be a series of check boxes to accomplish the next "first" on a preprogrammed progression to the next "first".  Where's the randomness that make replays feel fresh?

I think this is one of those devil-in-the-details things. If Adventure mode is linear like that then yeah, thats lame. If however its a really a big tree of different milestones that you can navigate as you please, shift your focus, dovetail a bunch of things together, etc. then I think it could be cool. First could be a tree of world firsts, landing probes and setting foot on different planets. Simultaneously there could be a track for speed records, a heap of different goals for visiting different biomes or collecting samples from surface features, other groupings for space station building, building colonies with x number of kerbals, etc. If there's an open platter like that that unlocks in multiple directions and there are different rewards for investing this way or that you can chose yourself how your program develops. I do agree that the generative contracts conjured some interesting goals I might not have thought up myself, but without that baseline structure for rewarding exploration it all feels a little random and hollow.

*Im not picking on you, you just made a lot of solid worth-discussing points.

 

[SpaceFace545]

33 minutes ago, HvP said:

If we are being semantically pedantic...

"Warp" means to twist or bend a shape, such as warped space-time. In fact, the term "warp speed" actually refers to the bending of space, not time specifically.

And "zoom" also means to move very quickly, as in to "zoom down the race track."

But more to the topic. I think that the graphic design choice is fine, for my taste. I would however like to keep the top and bottom center of the screen clear of obstruction for visibility. The first thing I do in a new game is to move the navball over to the left. And while the time controls at the bottom are much less intrusive, I would maybe opt for an auto-hide and hover pop-up action for them.

I just really want to know why the kerbals take up so much space, to be honest I don't really care about them that much especially when flying 

[TheNeutralCat]

12 minutes ago, SpaceFace545 said:

I just really want to know why the kerbals take up so much space, to be honest I don't really care about them that much especially when flying 

Agreed! Hopefully if the devs are sticking with that design they'll add a hide button.

Or maybe they'll add the ability to move UI elements anywhere/resize them, but that kind of seems impractical.

[mcwaffles2003]

17 hours ago, Lewie said:

for example time zoom. And the new ui, any seasoned player knows how the ui should work...or if it should be mover around.

13 hours ago, SpaceFace545 said:

I’m going to be blatant and to the point, the UI sucks. They thought on how to make more room but they just put everything in the corner into a big inconsistent pile. Like pushing all of your clothing into your closet floor instead of putting it away properly. And also time zoom, that makes zero sense whatsoever, it’s time warp, warp means to speed up, zoom means to increase a relative scale.

is the fact that something is titled time zoom really be a point of actual contention?
also, what about the not seasoned players? though i have a feeling we will finally be able to mod the UI anyways.

warp does not mean speed up:

warp
move (a ship) along by hauling on a rope attached to a stationary object on shore.

meanwhile:

zoom
(especially of a car or aircraft) move or travel very quickly.

Edited May 30, 2020 by mcwaffles2003