Where are the mountians?! (And first hours impressions/feedback, Now With Pictures!)

[OberonRex]

Flying west from KSC to go test my planes up and over and around the mountains was one of the best local geographic features for KSP1.  Now they're just mushy hills? Where are my majestic six polygon peaks at 5000m?!

 

On a more serious note; I'm psyched for how things are looking and I'm confident the devs want the best for the players. This is early days, but there's already some nits to pick!

 

UI: Agreeing with a lot of the general chatter here. Not a fan of the off center NavBall. Font is illegible at certain sizes. VAB looks like a children's book with tabs so large. Elements need to be scalable in general.

VAB:

Center of Mass is 100% opaque and blocks what you're looking at. It also doesn't update when changing fuel levels, needing the icon to be toggled off and on to change position.

 

Kind of lowkey hate the Parts Manager. Vehicles of any significant complexity are going to end up one endless scroll bar.  Guess which part I'm trying to get additional info on?

Answer: None of the highlighted control surfaces, I was trying to select the MK1 Cockpit. Apparently the dropdowns for previously selected parts don't auto close and remain highlighted in the lighter blue. Learning the names for the parts again with help a bit with identification, but it's a visual nightmare.

Additionally, during flight in KSP1, I will often have part inspection windows open for multiple things at the same time: Intakes for airflow, different engine types for relative ISPs, the ability to toggle items not specifically bound to an action group, etc, etc.  Currently I can only inspect one item at a time, and can only condense the Parts Manager down to a chunky, and completely opaque block.

 

The Redo button goes off the screen

 

Finally, please PLEASE give me back the ability to move horizontally with middle mouse hold again. I appreciate the Ctrl and Alt modifiers for speed, but only being able to rotate around a long aircraft oriented horizontally is Painful.

also give me back my mountains, thx!

Edited February 25, 2023 by OberonRex

[lemon1324]

This was the first thing I did as well, built a plane and flew west to find K2, which, of course, wasn't there.  On the plus side it does mean you can fly a proper glideslope approaching the runways instead of having to dive over the mountains.

[Sequence]

7 hours ago, OberonRex said:

Finally, please PLEASE give me back the ability to move horizontally with middle mouse hold again. I appreciate the Ctrl and Alt modifiers for speed, but only being able to rotate around a long aircraft oriented horizontally is Painful.

 

Hover over a part and click the middle mouse button and it anchors the camera to that part. It's taking time to adapt my muscle memory, but I'm starting to like it more than middle mouse scrolling. 

[TheOtherDave]

5 hours ago, lemon1324 said:

This was the first thing I did as well, built a plane and flew west to find K2, which, of course, wasn't there.  On the plus side it does mean you can fly a proper glideslope approaching the runways instead of having to dive over the mountains.

Oh, good! That always drove me batty.

[histalonia]

I really like the Nav ball on the left.  Never liked stuff obscuring much of the lower center.

[Klapaucius]

The mass, lift and thrust icons are huge and need to be scalable.   It made it very difficult with this little plane:

 

[OberonRex]

On 2/25/2023 at 7:10 PM, Sequence said:

Hover over a part and click the middle mouse button and it anchors the camera to that part. It's taking time to adapt my muscle memory, but I'm starting to like it more than middle mouse scrolling. 

I know this is a thing, and building for the past few days with it...still don't like it. It feels like we're being forced to play on console even before the PC version is finished. Being able to slew the camera around freely is objectively better for precision when designing complex craft. And currently, seeing as we have to strut the bejezus out of everything to get rid of the Safety Wobbles, it'd sure be nice to be able to reliably duck the camera inbetween parts for reinforcement placement instead of selecting a part and trying to get the angle right for the zoom.  This is also a big pain when trying to place things on long wings.

 

 

[Tw1]

I too am hoping for the return of the mountains.

[regex]

The mountains are all over the place, they just look like proper terrain rather than "six polygons". Check out the south pole sometime if you're after the old badness.

[OberonRex]

3 hours ago, regex said:

The mountains are all over the place, they just look like proper terrain rather than "six polygons". Check out the south pole sometime if you're after the old badness.

Kind of missing the point. I joked about the low poly peaks on the western range, but what's currently there is nothing like the original, and that's a disappointing change. I fully expected them to update and improve on the map, but nothing of the entire 5000M high mountain range exists now. It's the removal of a very prominent surface feature. I've seen plenty of "get to the top of K2" challenges, not like I'm talking about some random place on another continent.

[regex]

1 hour ago, OberonRex said:

It's the removal of a very prominent surface feature.

New game, new Kerbin. There's some pretty rough terrain to the north, might be worth a look.

[TheOtherDave]

33 minutes ago, regex said:

New game, new Kerbin. There's some pretty rough terrain to the north, might be worth a look.

Agreed. And, like I said, the mountain range being so close in the west made it tricky (at least for me) to line up on the runway and get reliable landings when returning from orbit.