UI Text and Control

[LunaTrick]

I have been playing for about a month. I love this game, but it tests my patience.

I am older than most of you, I presume. So my eyes are not as good as yours. I run the resolution at 1280X960 just so the text is big enough for me to read. Of course I give up a lot by doing this, but I have to read the clock etc.

I find the UI inconstant and that is where most of the my problems with this game lie.

There are data on the screen that have a background and data that do not. The ones that do not drive me nuts. How can I dock if the lime green numbers on the bright white SS gives so little contrast that I can't even see the numbers? I can't tell if I am moving forward or backward while docking, or moving at all sometimes. I rotate the camera all day long trying to get the lime green distance number to be over the black of space so I can read it, but it always falls on the ship where there is low contrast there AND no back ground. There are several ways to fix this. But it needs to be fixed - unless this game is only going to be for the young.

The clock and the delta/v numbers near the nav ball have the same problem. Sometimes stars pass through the numbers making it unclear whether I am seeing an 8 or a 3. This is especially important during precise maneuvers.

These things waste so much of my time trying to overcome, that I feel at some point I will have to walk away from the game, which I do not want to do. Please keep this in mind for the next release.

BTW, I am not color blind. Contrast seems to be my biggest issue - which can be fixed with a background.

[technicalfool]

I vote yes for this. Maybe as an accessibility option, if giving every bit of text a high-contrast background makes the UI look a little iffy by default.

Incidentally, have you tried increasing the flight UI size in the main settings menu? It doesn't increase all of the text, and it doesn't affect mods, but it does make things like the navball, staging indicators and altimeter get potentially rather large.

[LunaTrick]

I vote yes for this. Maybe as an accessibility option, if giving every bit of text a high-contrast background makes the UI look a little iffy by default.

I was not aware of this - thank you!

But....there are lots of problems with the UI. How about when you are doing a maneuver node and you are pulling on the prograde maker, let go, and then the maneuver node collapses back to that asterisk looking thing just because you release the mouse button, and then you have the planet, the ship and the node all stacked up on top of each other making it difficult from a far off view to select just the node?

Or how about when all three axis of the maneuver node stack up on top of each other and you are trying to grab the white circle to slide the node and you get one of the three controls instead?

Am I the only one suffering from all this? Hard to believe.

But thank you very much for the tip. Hopefully this can hold me over until they fix this stuff.

BTW, I was born just a month after Sputnik went up. I am the space age!

[LunaTrick]

I've had enough of this. I learned what I need to know to go interplanetary, and now the maneuver node editor is such a pain that I will never get to the other planets. What a friggin let down!

All I want to do is to establish an intercept with Duna and the mn is such a pain that I am ready to walk away from the game, or at least resolve to never see anything outside of the Kerbin orbit. That's not what I paid for.

The mn thingy keeps reducing to the asterisk. I cannot grab the white circle to slide it while the zoom is set to see the Duna orbit.

I know at one time you guys were playing without the mn editor (I read some old posts) but essentially what I would have to do because of these problems is fly by my pants instead of using the poorly designed tools provided in the game. Why does the frigging thing constantly minimize? How can it easily be expanded - hopefully with a keyboard press? A 3500 DPI mouse and I cannot select things on the screen? Unbelievable!

If the six arms of the mn were longer and if the mn node wouldn't minimize, this thread would have never been started. But they have my money, I feel I have a right to give feedback.

Also, stacking the ship, the planet of origin, the mn asterisk, the text associated with these items, all on top of each other just seems to be a bad idea. I mean....if I have Duna selected as the target and I have the mn open, why am I constantly getting asked if I want to set Kerbin as the target, when all I want to do is leave Kerbin?!!

I'm sorry...I am just so disappointed to get this far and find its the UI that is stopping me.

[Mr. Scruffy]

LunaTrick, you should seriously consider downloading, installing and using ´mechjeb´. It has (among many other functions) this neat ´maneuver node editor´, which seems to be exactly what you are looking for. It allows you to manipulate the next upcoming node in a seperate window without fiddling with the node itself on screen at all.

As an aside, since you seem to have missed this: Holding the right mouse-button and draging the mouse along moves the angle of your cam - use that whenever things (esp the node-arms) stack on each other. Fiddling with the nodes does take some patience and a lot of zooming in and out (without the use of mechjeb) and maybe the occasional switch of focus, which is tricky by itself (double click a planet to switch the cams focus on it - but sometimes it will switch to a craft close to that planet, instead).

If you still find it too hard to plan a maneuver directly from kerbin orbit to some other planet, there is always the dirty (and inefficient) workaround of first leaving kerbin´s sphere of influence in a rough direction towards the intended target and only plan the exact intercept course once you are orbiting kerbol (the sun): Involves less zooming and things become a little more intuitive this way.