Feedback and Suggestions for improving VAB UI/usability/functionality

[twich22]

I like to build big ships. This means I spend countless hours in the VAB meticulously placing parts just right so that the ship is flightworthy. It requires a fair amount of precision in order to ensure the vessel flies straight and has balanced physics, as well as to ensure that the vessel is structurally sound and will not tear itself apart during flight. So during these hours long builds, anything in the VAB that makes my life difficult, or worse, forces me to revert to a previous saved version of my vessel, is something that makes the game less fun.

So, here are the issues that I have noticed in the VAB:

-The green outline of parts actually obscures the edges of the parts you are trying to align. So if I want to perfectly align the edge of a part with another part, I cannot actually see the edges of the part i am placing due to this large green outline that is overlapping with the edge of my part. Not good. 

-Parts manager is extremely slow on larger vessels. Parts manager is opened with the right mouse button when hovering over a part. in the VAB, the right mouse button is also the camera control. This is not a good combination. Often the parts manager is accidentally opened when trying to move your camera in the VAB. This is extremely annoying. Might take a few seconds to open it then you have to close it again. Whats worse, this can sometimes happen when you are attempting to place a part. This should not be possible but it is. 

-VAB too small. The VAB is rectangular. 2 of the sides of the VAB are nice and long, which is fine. However, the other 2 sides are narrow. This is a problem as when you rotate your camera in these directions there is not enough room and your camera ends up all wonky and you cant really meneuver it properly or see what you are doing. So you are limited to only 2 angles of vision for the most part instead of 4. 

- There should not be any UI elements floating in space in the VAB unless you toggle them on or somehow choose to have them pop up. Imagine you are trying to place a part, but there are a bunch of floating UI elements around your vessel. These UI elements do something, I am really not sure what though, as I have never needed to use them. Toggle shroud? or change colors? Or in some other way alter parts. These UI elements also like to follow your mouse cursor. Sometimes they appear over your mouse cursor when its hovering near a part. Now, imagine you are dragging a part towards your vessel and you want to place it. But unfortunately a UI element has appeared over your mouse cursor, and now instead of placing your part, you are now attempting to open some unknown UI interface. Not good. Now you have to reorient your camera to try to find an angle so that the UI element is not over your mouse cursor while trying to place the part. 

- The "rotate" and "translate" part function UI is crap, no offense. First, it should probably be split up between rotation and translation into 2 different UI's. Having 6 different arrows which all look relatively similar jammed into a small space which also happens to be near an assembly of parts all of which are clickable is a recipie for bad things. Second, they are not easy to click. Sometimes you think you clicked it but you didnt. For some reason the edges of the arrows in the UI are not exact. They should be changed to something much more defined and easier to identify when you have actually engaged the UI and when you have not. 3rd, because the UI is overlaying other things that are clickable, you might accidentaly click something behind the UI instead of the UI itself. 4th, there is no UI element that helps you get a sense of direction/orientation/angulation. Its hard to tell if your part has been rotated to the appropriate amount to align properly with ground/assembly/other part. 5th, it might be easier to have the rotation keys be in a separate UI window instead of as a floating UI. This would make them more reliable in terms of location and orientation, as well as prevent them from having anything else around them that you might accidentally click. However they can work as floating UI as well. 

- It can be difficult to get your part to attach where you want it to. Because attachment nodes are "sticky/grabby", any time you are trying to place a part near any attachment node, it will jump to attach to the attachment node regardless of whether or not that is where you want to place the part. The opposite can also sometimes be true. If you have an attachment node surrounded by other parts, it can sometimes be challenging to get a part to attach to that node, as it instead wants to attach to surrounding parts. There should be a way to exclude either attachment nodes or other parts from the possible sites of attachment at will. I think a simply key to either toggle on/off each function, or a key that you can hold, is the best option. For example, 3 different toggleable states: one for attaching to both attachment nodes as well as sides of parts, one for attaching to only attachment nodes, and one for attaching to only the sides of parts. This will allow for the player to be much more precise when building craft without having to find ways to work around these limitations. 

- Symmetry modes and mirror modes can be further refined to be based on vessel or individual part. For example, maybe I want 6x symmetry around a specific part that has already been placed on an assembly using 4x radial symmetry mode, or maybe I want to add 2x mirrored symmetry to a 4 x radial symmetry vessel. Separating out symmetry modes further into part based or assembly based symmetry mode might be a good feature to add at some point. I know there are probably significant challenges/limitations with this but if its possible it would be nice. 

- It was nice to be able to save an assembly without having to make an entire new or separate workspace for that assembly. For example if you have 2 assemblys on the same workspace but only want to save 1 of them, or want to save each assembly separately so you can later merge. Right now I dont think there is a way to do this. Instead you have to save both assmblys together, then delete 1 assembly and save the other assembly under a different name, then revert back to the 2 assmblys and delete the other assembly and save a 3rd time under a 3rd name. Not very user friendly. 

- The save function is cumbersome and confusing. Its not clear what the difference is between workspace name and vessel name. These names also seem to change sometimes. Sometimes vessel name is displayed, and sometimes workspace name is displayed. So depending on whether you changed the workspace name or vessel name or not, you might not be able to tell the difference between 2 different workspaces because they have the same vessel name and that is what is being displayed. If there is no real functionality between these 2, then just get rid of the redundancy. Otherwise, change it to make it uniform and much more clearly distinguish the difference between workspace name and vessel name. For example, workspace name is ALWAYS the name displayed, except in cases of X,Y,Z... We dont need to have 2 names all the time it gets very confusing and overwhelming very quickly. 

- save function is also a bit cumbersome at times. I dont want to have to click 3 times every time I want to save as well as have an interface pop up. One way to fix this would be to add toggleable options to the save UI so that clicking "save" in the VAB will simply save the vessel. You can add toggleable options to automatically override the warning that you are saving over a previously saved vessel. Best option of all, add a toggle that will force the game to automatically add, incrementally, a number to the end of a vessel when you press the save button. So Vessel becomes vessel 1 becomes vessel 2 becomes vessel 3. Or vessel 1 becomes vessel 1.1 becomes vessel 1.2.... etc. This way, you can save a ship with one press of the save button, you dont need to open any UI or click anything extra, and you dont have to worry about overriding a previously saved vessel because each save is a new vessel name (unless for some reason you already have something with the name Vessel 1.2)

Ive got to go for now but ill post more later, probably to a new thread, when I think of more stuff. 

Edited March 21, 2023 by twich22

[Sea_Kerman]

Also the absolute snap in the move tool isn’t actually absolute 

 

 

[twich22]

9 hours ago, Sea_Kerman said:

Also the absolute snap in the move tool isn’t actually absolute 

Yup. Thanks for the addition. Figured this out on day 1 when I was trying to align all my landing gear relative to the ground and they were not all the same. 

Edited March 22, 2023 by twich22