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Engine Activate/Deactivate Control Text Does Not Always Correctly Indicate the State of the Engine (Shoule Be a Toggle Not a Button)

Davidian1024

By Davidian1024
in v0.1.3

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Davidian1024

Davidian1024

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Reported Version: v0.1.3 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes 
OS: Linux Ubuntu 20.04.6 | CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3400G | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti | RAM: 16GB

 

Specs: (see further below for how to give us all the info we need here)

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Severity: Med (Can be highly disruptive to a mission.  Could convince you that a particular engine is active when it's not or vice versa.  The workaround is to keep a very careful mental note of which engines are active and which are not.)

Frequency: High (I believe this occurs all the time with all engines.  I've tested it with at least one of each of the methalox, methane, monopropellant, xenon and hydrogen based engines)

Description:  The engine Activate/Deactivate control within the parts manager has text that changes to report the current state of the engine.  This text does not seem to always update when it should.  It then ends up reporting that the engine is in the opposite state of what it actually is.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Launch anything with any engine.  (This could be just an engine.  The new extendable engines are good choices because their extended/retracted state visually shows what state the engine is actually in.)
  2. (Optional) Cut the throttle or set it low enough to not lift off or otherwise interfere with the test.  Or build a craft with the engine on top pointing up.
  3. Right click the engine to pull it up in the parts manager.
  4. Click the Activate/Deactivate button.
  5. Observe the text of the activate/deactivate control.
  6. Use other means to determine whether the engine is actually active or not.
  7. Repeat steps 4-5 as needed.

Sometimes, it would take multiple presses of the button to get the state to be out of sync with the actual engine state.  Also, I think that triggering a stage that would activate and engine counts as a press of this button or call to some underlying function or whatever.

FWIW, I've sometimes been able to get the state indicated by the text to match the engine's actual state by changing the throttle of a running engine.  At least I think that's what did it, I'm not able to get this to work consistently.

I also want to stress that the way this control is designed is highly counterintuitive.  A toggle switch would be much clearer to the user.  Seeing the switch in the green activated state or black deactivated state would make it easy to know at a glance what state the engine is in.  As things currently are, you have to parse text and imply deduction in order to determine what state the engine is in.

Example(when things are working): The engine is active.  The button text reads "Deactivate".  If you as the user want to know what state the engine is in, you first have to parse this text, which is telling you that if you click the button it will deactivate the engine.  Then you have to deduce that this means the engine must be active.  Nothing actually directly indicates the current state of the engine.  This is much more complicated than it needs to be.  It becomes problematic if you have many engines which need to be in different states depending on your mission.

 

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Edited by Anth12
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