KSP2 EA Grand Discussion Thread.

[Bej Kerman]

10 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

You saw the PFD picture I uploaded as an example, that's as optimal as it can possible get whilst still keeping the tapes. If you remove the tapes (since they won't ever show useful information anyways) it can get even more compact.

I don't think so, a PFD like the example you sent would be an information overload for a new player who has never seen a PFD before. Those things are designed for pilots who are going to spend ages learning the ins and outs of their aircrafts, I still want to see a mockup geared towards KSP itself. You're purely thinking about the size of the navball and treating things like negative space and dividing information into clear clusters as an afterthought. Each part of the navball needs to clearly look like a different readout and have space between them, which I think it does an excellent job of.

I still contend that the navball's size only becomes a problem when you shove it inside the center third of the screen and that its current appearance is completely fine where it is by default, but I enjoy a good UI mockup.

Edited November 9, 2023 by Bej Kerman

[PDCWolf]

13 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

I don't think so, a PFD like the example you sent would be an information overload for a new player who has never seen a PFD before. Those things are designed for pilots who are going to spend ages learning the ins and outs of their aircrafts, I still want to see a mockup geared towards KSP itself. You're purely thinking about the size of the navball and treating things like negative space and dividing information into clear clusters as an afterthought. Each part of the navball needs to clearly look like a different readout and have space between them, which I think it does an excellent job of.

I still contend that the navball's size only becomes a problem when you shove it inside the center third of the screen and that its current appearance is completely fine where it is by default, but I enjoy a good UI mockup.

That's just inflated hyperbole. Looking at a PFD is an intuitive as looking at the current navball, the only thing it lacks is the labels on everything, and whatever is not on the KSP navball can be safely removed (which would actually make it more compact).

 

 

[Scarecrow71]

Ok, so if the major argument is viewability of the screen, and that you need to see the ship when docking and/or landing...why not just hit F2 during these situations?  You aren't looking at the navball, you aren't focused on any of the UI elements at that point; your entire and total focus is on the craft itself.  Unless during landing you say that you are focused on distance to the ground, or in either situation you need to be focused on speed....in which case you aren't really looking at the ship, are you?

Also, why left and not right?  Why bottom left and not top left?  What is the argument for it being left and not right, or bottom and not top?

Edited November 9, 2023 by Scarecrow71

[Bej Kerman]

4 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

That's just inflated hyperbole.

It isn't.

5 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Looking at a PFD is an intuitive as looking at the current navball

It isn't.

5 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

which would actually make it more compact

Just so it's clear, a two year course in graphic design would not start and end on the word "compact". If you or anyone else ever take up the challenge of improving the KSP 2 navball, maybe get familiar with the word "negative space" as well? Because you should expect to hear it a lot if people start making navball concepts. It's a game, aesthetics are extremely important in UX/UI (the way a UI is layed out is not just decorative!) and the nature of a PFD won't do if you need a player to be able to gather info from the navball quickly without having to pause to parse all the numbers and info. A 1:1 copy of the Boeing PFD will simply not do.

1 minute ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Ok, so if the major argument is viewability of the screen, and that you need to see the ship when docking and/or landing...why not just hit F2 during these situations?

Because why not both? That's why it's in a corner and not the middle.

[Scarecrow71]

1 minute ago, Bej Kerman said:

Because why not both? That's why it's in a corner and not the middle.

That...didn't really answer the question.  If you can hit F2 during these situations, why not just leave it in the middle and hit F2?

[MechBFP]

1 minute ago, Scarecrow71 said:

That...didn't really answer the question.  If you can hit F2 during these situations, why not just leave it in the middle and hit F2?

Same reason the nav ball isn’t in the literal middle of the screen. 

[Bej Kerman]

1 minute ago, Scarecrow71 said:

That...didn't really answer the question.  If you can hit F2 during these situations, why not just leave it in the middle and hit F2?

Because why not have the navball and the ship visible at the same time, and have an adequate amount of screen space to look at the ship with?

[Scarecrow71]

Just now, MechBFP said:

Same reason the nav ball isn’t in the literal middle of the screen. 

Which would be...why, exactly?

Can I just get a straight answer please?

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, Scarecrow71 said:

Can I just get a straight answer please?

I just gave you a straight answer

[Scarecrow71]

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

Because why not have the navball and the ship visible at the same time, and have an adequate amount of screen space to look at the ship with?

And as I said, during the times when you need to focus on the ship itself - docking and landing, as you and others have pointed out - you aren't focused on the navball anyhow.

[Spicat]

1 minute ago, Scarecrow71 said:

And as I said, during the times when you need to focus on the ship itself - docking and landing, as you and others have pointed out - you aren't focused on the navball anyhow.

When I'm landing I'm looking at the altitude, the speed and my craft, I need all this information. Hitting F2 doesn't solve that, putting it on the side does.

[Bej Kerman]

4 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

And as I said, during the times when you need to focus on the ship itself - docking and landing, as you and others have pointed out - you aren't focused on the navball anyhow.

I'm not sure how you dock, but when I'm docking, I quickly tab my eye between the navball and the ship itself, and having it in the corner is a massive help because it's just more space to see what's happening around my vessel. Adding a pointless keystroke JUST to have it in the middle would be even more obtuse and pointless than PCDWolf's earlier "solution" of panning the camera when the center-panned navball leaves you with a CinemaScope sized portion of a potentially already tiny screen to view your vessel with.

I'm noticing a pattern in all these "solutions" to a center-mounted navball, and that's having to manually adjust the screen and camera during these situations, which would be distracting, instead of just having it at the side as it is now and leaving it at that.

Edited November 9, 2023 by Bej Kerman

[MechBFP]

2 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Which would be...why, exactly?

Can I just get a straight answer please?

Figuring out the implications of the navball being smack dab  in the middle of the screen during gameplay is left as an exercise to the reader. 

[Pthigrivi]

Id love to see a challenge where players put craft paper over their entire monitor except the nav ball and try to land on the Mun. 

[Scarecrow71]

6 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

I'm not sure how you dock, but when I'm docking, I quickly tab my eye between the navball and the ship itself, and having it in the corner is a massive help because it's just more space to see what's happening around my vessel. Adding a pointless keystroke JUST to have it in the middle would be even more obtuse and pointless than PCDWolf's earlier "solution" of panning the camera when the center-panned navball leaves you with a CinemaScope sized portion of a potentially already tiny screen to view your vessel with.

I'm noticing a pattern in all these "solutions" to a center-mounted navball, and that's having to manually adjust the screen and camera during these situations, which would be distracting, instead of just having it at the side as it is now and leaving it at that.

Just because you disagree with it doesn't make it wrong.  Nor does it make your way the only way.

Also, I'm still curious - genuinely curious - as to why bottom left.  Why not right, or top left?  What is the significance of placing it bottom left?

[Royalswissarmyknife]

5 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Also, I'm still curious - genuinely curious - as to why bottom left.  Why not right, or top left?  What is the significance of placing it bottom left?

I would personally prefer bottom right.

[Bej Kerman]

1 minute ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Just because you disagree with it doesn't make it wrong.  Nor does it make your way the only way.

To quote Tantacrul:

"Now, obviously this is all subjective and you might think, 'Hm. I prefer [X]'. And that's okay. It's okay to be wrong."

I'm just saying, forcing players to disable their UI to get a check in on the physical state of their rocket and pan the camera around when the UI is present, all because you didn't want the navball to be panned to the left, is horrible design, and it isn't justified by the subjectivity argument because, by that token, people aren't going to like having to put a lot more thought into managing their screen space. In a game like KSP where you deal with a lot of intense situations in real time, you don't want them to be managing screen estate at the same time that they're landing a rocket. Don't seriously suggest that panning the camera and juggling between F2 modes while landing a rocket is your idea of a good alternative to simply having the navball on the left so we don't have to do any of that.

[Spicat]

2 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Just because you disagree with it doesn't make it wrong.  Nor does it make your way the only way.

Also, I'm still curious - genuinely curious - as to why bottom left.  Why not right, or top left?  What is the significance of placing it bottom left?

Not being at the center is the important thing here.

But I can justify the position a bit more, for the top or bottom I don't have a strong opinion as I don't see an advantage of one over the other thus, because I don't see a reason for it (at least for now), I see no justification to changing it over ksp1 (because as we can see, muscle memory is a hard thing to change).

For the navball being at the left I have a reason: I would argue that the right is for the staging, which actually changed from ksp1 to be at a better place. Why? Because now staging is at the same place in flight as it is in the vab.

[Bej Kerman]

9 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Also, I'm still curious - genuinely curious - as to why bottom left.  Why not right, or top left?  What is the significance of placing it bottom left?

Don't know, I probably wouldn't mind it if it were at the top since that's where the sky is, maybe the devs put it at the bottom since it's a habit to look down for instrumentation, whatever. As long as it's in the corner and a lot of space is given to the rocket, I don't care.

[Pthigrivi]

16 minutes ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

I would personally prefer bottom right.

I love this question. I usually bias my view on launch viewing from the south with the rocket heading west to east/left to right. Angle wise this would probably make bottom right the best place for the nav-ball on ascent. But ascents are pretty forgiving for me at this point. The bigger challenge is usually landing and whether easy-peazy minmus flats or precision atmo landings Im still viewing from the south watching the landing coming in west to east. From this angle the bottom left is the best place for the nav-ball as I can maximize the viewing angle diagonally from upper left to lower right view as I come in to land. Either way in those last critical 100m you're heading pretty much straight down and maximizing your vertical screen real-estate becomes paramount. 

Edited November 9, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[PDCWolf]

46 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

It isn't.

It isn't.

On the one hand, you. On the other hand, the entirety of the aviation and aerospace industry coming together on a simple, universally accepted, compact layout to reduce training times and not have your pilot looking all over for information. Yeah no, I know who I'm listening to.

46 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Just so it's clear, a two year course in graphic design would not start and end on the word "compact".

I thought I just came from a whole page of people crying about the navball eating up a lot of the screen if it was in the middle? Well, that's because it's uselessly big, bloated, includes useless elements, and misuses more negative space than it needs.

If you want more graphic design course words, readability is low, specially because all values wobble with phantom forces, and the default altitude is set to ground. There's also a lot of unused borders, as they're borders that open to negative space, which means the negative space could easily be eliminated. There's no skeuomorphism in it at all, as it's completely a fantasy design not inspired by anything real, so it's more gamified than realistic. It is an uninspired mess of clashing signals and misplaced elements that somehow all end up on top of each other for no reason. Lastly, it's inconsistent in a lot of its choices, namely how some things have full labels, others have no labels, and others have l33t_spk_labels.

28 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Id love to see a challenge where players put craft paper over their entire monitor except the nav ball and try to land on the Mun. 

Post it on the challenges subforum / subreddit. I'm sure this'd be fun. You could use orbital parameters plus epoch to know where the mun is, and the height of your lander stage to know the ground altitude true zero. The only hard thing really would be proofing, as it'd require people record their own covered monitors for a very long period of time.

40 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

you aren't focused on the navball anyhow.

How do people not dock through the navball? if you match alignments and correctly set the control point and the target part, the navball is perfectly aligned, and thus your whole craft.

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

On the one hand, you. On the other hand, the entirety of the aviation and aerospace industry coming together on a simple, universally accepted, compact layout to reduce training times and not have your pilot looking all over for information. Yeah no, I know who I'm listening to.

A graphic designer working in the aviation industry obviously has different goals to a graphic designer working in the gaming industry. If you're listening to the former and not the latter, don't tell me you're listening to the right people. Since we're on Chapter 8 "Appeal to Authority", KSP 2's graphic designer(s) knew what they were doing when they made each element big and recognisable.

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Just so it's clear, a two year course in graphic design would not start and end on the word "compact".

I thought I just came from a whole page of people crying about the navball eating up a lot of the screen if it was in the middle?

Well, it's not in the middle so that's not a problem. The problem only exists when it's in the middle, and surprise surprise, it doesn't need to be in the middle.

 [snip]

Edited November 10, 2023 by Vanamonde

[PDCWolf]

57 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

A graphic designer working in the aviation industry obviously has different goals to a graphic designer working in the gaming industry. If you're listening to the former and not the latter, don't tell me you're listening to the right people. Since we're on Chapter 8 "Appeal to Authority", KSP 2's graphic designer(s) knew what they were doing when they made each element big and recognisable.

Except they're making instruments to fly spacecraft with. Making the things recognizable is fine, but it's greatly exaggerated.

57 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Well, it's not in the middle so that's not a problem. The problem only exists when it's in the middle, and surprise surprise, it doesn't need to be in the middle.

Lmao. "it can be bad so long as it agrees with what I say".

[snip]

But a PFD being unreadable is only a construction inside your mind. Reality begs to disagree, the thing was made to be instantly readable at a glance with minimum training.

[snip]

Edited November 10, 2023 by Vanamonde

[Bej Kerman]

53 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

A graphic designer working in the aviation industry obviously has different goals to a graphic designer working in the gaming industry. If you're listening to the former and not the latter, don't tell me you're listening to the right people. Since we're on Chapter 8 "Appeal to Authority", KSP 2's graphic designer(s) knew what they were doing when they made each element big and recognisable.

Except they're making instruments to fly spacecraft with.

They're not making instruments a newbie can figure out in the time a tutorial lasts and you should not be under the impression they would be any good with that.

53 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Well, it's not in the middle so that's not a problem. The problem only exists when it's in the middle, and surprise surprise, it doesn't need to be in the middle.

Lmao. "it can be bad so long as it agrees with what I say".

Except it's not bad.

53 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

 

But a PFD being unreadable is only a construction inside your mind. Reality begs to disagree, the thing was made to be instantly readable at a glance with minimum training.

"readable at a glance with minimum training" means 2 completely different things in the aerospace industry and the gaming industry.

53 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Oh boo hoo.

The level of discussion that can be expected in this forum.

Such as "it's bad because (it's / it's not) skeuomorphic"? [snip]

Edited November 10, 2023 by Vanamonde

[MechBFP]

Are these PFDs mounted right on the cockpit glass so they obstruct the pilots view?