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You can’t spell User Interface without U & I


Nesses

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25 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

As first step towards a readable future. (I'm still not a fan of mixing clear, smooth font with whatever pixelretro80's the other thing is (srsly, this needs to go, hopefully by the time of 0.3))

I can't agree more with this. I would apply this to the shading style and edges of icons and UI elements as well. I know this is probably somebody's baby, but as they teach in design school, sometimes you have to kill your baby.

These elements look quite unpolished and inferior compared to what KSP1 ended up with. Please set a goal of moving past this, smoothing out radii, and using more pixels / finer gradient shading before this goes too far and ends up being the de facto design language for the UI.

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20 minutes ago, Kimera Industries said:

If you are slowly parachuting down to the surface of Kerbin, you should be able to recover a vessel.

Ehhhhh, I don't know. Whichever "Safe" Landing Speed gets picked would be kinda arbitrary. The difference between 

  • Safe, No-Problem Landing
  • Broke the Heatshield, but otherwise fine
  • The craft is a total write-off

Depends not only on speed, but the craft itself, what you're landing on, and the craft orientation. It'd make it even less clear when a craft is recoverable.

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30 minutes ago, Kimera Industries said:

getting down to the surface takes sooooo long.

Not if you hit the chutes at 1000m :D

Or even less. The longer you wait the faster you hit the ground.

Disclaimer: Vessel recovery may be hampered by ground contact velocity.

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50 minutes ago, Aarolin said:

Ehhhhh, I don't know. Whichever "Safe" Landing Speed gets picked would be kinda arbitrary. The difference between 

  • Safe, No-Problem Landing
  • Broke the Heatshield, but otherwise fine
  • The craft is a total write-off

Depends not only on speed, but the craft itself, what you're landing on, and the craft orientation. It'd make it even less clear when a craft is recoverable.

Then maybe a little flashing icon (like the science one) that tells you when a craft is recoverable.

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"When in any time warp state other than 1x, the UI does not adequately communicate the state change. The tendency to interpret an under-warp failed control input as a bug has caught out quite a few members of our own team, and is likely responsible for quite a few bug reports"

I'm not sure what an "under-warp failed control input" is, but it is difficult to tell what level of warp you are in. I mean, if you go by the gauge, then something else is wrong, because there are times when I appear to be in 1X and I can't stage, or I try to reduce warp and it pauses the game at 10x or something. It just doesn't seem to work right on a couple of levels.

I'd like to vote here for "Pause" NOT being the lowest level of warp. 1X should be the lowest, and pause should be separate.

"Rearranging the staging stack order when selecting the bottom-most stage is difficult"

I find rearranging staging difficult and unreliable no matter which stage I'm trying to drag. Sometimes I can't get it to work at all.

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All great things to see. One thing not mentioned and among my bigger concerns with the UI, and perhaps more technical than the responsibility of the art/UI specifically, is the incorrect dV reporting in the VAB and realtime readout. The readout overestimating by as much as 3x the real value has led to scrapping launches for complete rebuilds. I've been lucky enough not to be impacted notably on transfer stages or landers, but this would be a heavy impact to anyone from a user experience perspective.

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Love all this. I have made a number of UI notes but I want to speak to a very specific important function that I think neither KSP1 nor KSP2 has really captured: Snapping maneuver nodes to Ap, Pe, An, and Dn. 90% of the time when traversing space you're really trying to align your burn vector with one of these 4 points and it would be absolutely amazing if we could right-click and have the option to snap a maneuver node precisely on them. This is a little tricky now because of the way KSP2 handles burn start/stop times vs KSP1's centered nodes, but it would be SO valuable to have this capability for accurate and efficient maneuver planning and execution.  I think this is one of those little tools that if implemented folks would wonder how they ever got by without it. 

Edited by Pthigrivi
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Very nice.
But honestly, personally I just want the parts manager gone and reverted back to how KSP1 was. I really can't see what was wrong with the old system, right click a part to bring its settings, easy, simple, works. And the same goes for prop transfer, Alt Right Click 2 parts and transfer, again easy, simple and works. These are some of the reasons I'm still playing mostly KSP1, at the very least give us a legacy mode for older player who are used to the old system.
As someone in another post said, the UI wastes a LOT of space with where its placed, and even its visuals, too much is being wasted on making it pretty covering the actual gameplay, and once you add some mods and open extra windows, oh boy i might as well not have a 3D view at all, just the instruments. And I cant scale things down to compensate because then certain text becomes too small to read on a 1080p monitor.
Another things that I just can NOT get used to is the VAB controls, I hate them with a passion, please give me back the KSP1 controls.

TLDR: Parts manager bad. UI big elements with small information. Give us the option for KSP1 VAB controls.

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1 hour ago, EritoKaio said:

Another things that I just can NOT get used to is the VAB controls, I hate them with a passion, please give me back the KSP1 controls.

Overall I dont think going back to KSP1 design is a good idea, as the new VAB controls do have some benefits, but there are definitely a need to change a couple things. 
 

1) The ability to manually scroll  the camera up and down the rocket.

2) Remove the camera automatically centering its self on parts, or moving the camera at all unless the player specifically requested it to be done, and intentionally.

Maybe a couple others as well, but I think these are the worst offenders. 

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1 hour ago, MechBFP said:

Overall I dont think going back to KSP1 design is a good idea, as the new VAB controls do have some benefits, but there are definitely a need to change a couple things. 
 

1) The ability to manually scroll  the camera up and down the rocket.

2) Remove the camera automatically centering its self on parts, or moving the camera at all unless the player specifically requested it to be done, and intentionally.

Maybe a couple others as well, but I think these are the worst offenders. 

Yes, I agree with this. Not the full thing, just primarily these features.

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8 hours ago, TROPtastic said:

That should help a lot with legibility, as this quick mockup hopefully shows:

2WUX6uh.png
 

What should also help with legibility is removing all zeroes to the left of the timer, they make you look extra hard for the most significant digit in that long string. Compare:

T -0yr:0d:00h:53m:48s

T -53m:48s

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5 hours ago, RocketBlam said:

I'd like to vote here for "Pause" NOT being the lowest level of warp. 1X should be the lowest, and pause should be separate

I actually kinda like "Pause" counting as a time warp level, because it means that I can mash the slow down key until time stops altogether, which is nice if I'm panicking. Of course, I could also learn to use the forward slash key to pause time immediately, so changing this wouldn't be a major problem for me.

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9 hours ago, Nesses said:

 SOI transit "bullseye" indicators are too bright, too big, and too prominent relative to other map elements (this is a personal bugbear of mine)

Imho they should just get rid of those blue things. Really don't see the added value.

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1 hour ago, DV-13 said:

T -0yr:0d:00h:53m:48s

T -53m:48s

Supposedly there is a "UI/UX team", but they can't figure out very basic, glaringly obvious ideas like this (which I personally implemented in a KSP1 mod reflexively as soon as I realized I needed to display pending timespans—in fact you can see it in my many-years-old forum signature!) without user feedback? It's frustrating and begs for an explanation.

Edited by HebaruSan
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First, you need to completely abandon the pixel style of interface elements and fonts. Well, he doesn't fit, it's a failure.
Make the line spacing smaller, much smaller.
Make the normal scaling of the interface elements and fonts depending on the resolution. It feels like everything is done for 640x480 resolution. 
Return the normal detail menus as in the first part.

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1 hour ago, DV-13 said:

T -0yr:0d:00h:53m:48s

T -53m:48s

Or better yet:

T -53m48s

since you don't really need more than one separator character between the fields. (Or even 53:48, though that could get ambiguous if you want to show longer timespans with reduced precision.)

I also have to wonder about the point of a 2-digit "hours" field when there are only 6 hours in a Kerbin day...

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