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[Dunbaratu]

If you rightclick an engine and select "deactivate" while the throttle is up, leave the throttle where it is, then rightclick the engine again and select "activate", the engine powers up again right to the same throttle setting.

So why not handle this proposed change that way instead? Have 'x' leave the throttle where it is and just deactivate the engine, and then when re-activating with whatever hotkey that ends up being (I'm not talking here about that part of the debate), the engines reactivate rather than the throttle setting changing. The throttle setting actually remains exactly where it is and you can still move it up and down with shift/ctrl while the engine is off (Just like you do prior to launch, where you bring the throttle up before activating your first stage usually.) You can move the throttle lever while no engines are active and the new setting will take effect the moment an engine turns on.

The only difficult part here coding-wise is you'd have to track whether an engine is active or not with two different settings, like so:

An engine is active if and only if:

Whatever previous variables the code used to decide this setting (The staging list, and the ability to manually rightclick the engine to toggle it) say it's true,

AND

The new setting, something like "globalEnginesActive" is also on.

Thus if you turn off globalEnginesActive, but leave the other variables alone as they are now, the engines all stop but the game still remembers which ones they were that were active. Then when you turn globalEnginesActive on again, the ones that fit the previous criteria start running again.

Then the idea is that "X" toggles globalEnginesActive and that's all it does.

Edited August 14, 2013 by Steven Mading
forgot to mention explicitly the activating again of an engine.