Time Warp: Pain, Gain, and I Wish

[neilcomara]

Pain 

Really don't like that jamming down on '<' ends up pausing the game. I don't know how other people have played ksp, but I like speeding up time warp fast and then if I'm over zealous, I mash <<<<<<<<<<<<<< fifty times. I do use '/' occasionally but it's not as simple of a transition in different situations if you were to do an observational study. There's certain things that I find creating a maneuver node really wasteful for. If I'm just making small adjustments to smooth out the circularization of my orbit, I'm not going to open a node for that, or left click in the map mode and click 'time warp here'...I'm just going to eyeball it because it's easier. Same with matching orbital planes...no need to go through the trouble of creating a maneuver node for that. I just fast forward with '>' but then as I get closer I mash '<' repeatedly. But then I may have slowed down to 1x speed a little too soon, so I have to hit '>' again. For these kinds of situations, going back and forth between '<' and '>' is just a much easier interaction for the user than to keep going back and forth between '>' and '/'. 

'/' is the equivalent of slamming your car brake down as hard as humanly possible, and for that reason, I only use it when I absolutely know that I'm intending on stopping on 1x speed, and I plan on staying there for a while. If I ever need to pause the game, that's what the escape key is for.

I might be weird though, so it would be interesting to conduct some more user testing to see what other users find more beneficial. On my end, it just makes more sense to have repeated mashing of '<' only knock you down to 1x speed instead of completely pausing the game.

Gain

The speed transitions of speeding up and slowing down time warp feel so smooth, I love the way it transitions...feels way better than ksp 1

I love the way engines are working in sped up time warp. That one developer talked about how she would do those mega long burns on the nerv engine and how the team was working on fixing that in one of the Dev insight videos, and wow you guys actually pulled it off. I've just been flying around in a tiny little xeno engine thing and those time warp burns are a life saver.

I also can't believe how smooth the x4 time warps in the atmosphere are now...ksp always went full kraken on me when I tried to do x4 warps in the atmosphere but you guys crushed it and it feels awesome.

I Wish

I don't know what you guys have planned for transfer window tools...my guess is you guys have some tricks up your sleeves. That may come wayyyy down the road though, I mean it took KSP 1 forever to add transfer window tools, and IMO they still weren't very good. Here's a feature you can implement quicker to ease players' pain points right now while you're working on transfer window tools:

On the bottom of the UI, it shows the date: "000y ,00d, 00:00:00" If you give users the ability to double click these numbers and fast forward to a specific year, day, and time, they can just fast forward to exact times that already existing transfer window tools are already giving us. It would ease the pain of inaccurate time warping to certain dates, and simultaneously ease the pain of having to wait several minutes to time warp hundreds of days

 

Thanks for a very fun day 1 in KSP 2, Fly Safe!