A Pause Button

[Kingofawesome13]

There have been so many times where having a pause button would be very useful. I think a pause button is a must for a mod.

[Higgs]

shouldnt just hitting ESC be sufficient for a pause, seeing as it pauses the game?

[Bill Phil]

I think the OP means pause while still being able to interact with parts. A 0* timewarp if you will.

[LethalDose]

I think the OP means pause while still being able to interact with parts. A 0* timewarp if you will.

If this is what he meant, then it's pretty well-established it can't happen because of how unity renders scenes.

[TKO]

But if KSP is able to ramp up and down time-scales, surely then KSP is able to set time increments of its universe to zero (or even close to zero, if zero isn't do-able), and Unity can continue to render the game oblivious to this. ..I could be wrong of course. I'm not sure what this well-established thing is LethalDose - any link to it? I'd love to find out.

I kinda like the idea of a time=0 button on the time-accelleration scale, as I'm sometimes doing fiddly switching of RCS tanks in flight, or other things that I can't attach to an action-group, and it can be easy to miss passing a manoeuver node when doing fiddly things.

[Roadkill]

Mods already exist for these issues. Time Control and Kerbal Alarm Clock.

[LethalDose]

But if KSP is able to ramp up and down time-scales, surely then KSP is able to set time increments of its universe to zero (or even close to zero, if zero isn't do-able), and Unity can continue to render the game oblivious to this. ..I could be wrong of course. I'm not sure what this well-established thing is LethalDose - any link to it? I'd love to find out.

I kinda like the idea of a time=0 button on the time-accelleration scale, as I'm sometimes doing fiddly switching of RCS tanks in flight, or other things that I can't attach to an action-group, and it can be easy to miss passing a manoeuver node when doing fiddly things.

I don't have time this morning to find the old threads, but the gist of the previous explanations has been that Unity's render and/or physics engine need(s) sequential frames with some non-zero dT to know how to render the scene and to let the player interact with the scene.

Currently, the physics time warp works by only rendering every X'th frame (e.g. 3x time warp only renders ever 3rd frame), not by manipulating the dT (I think the physicsless warp manipulates dT, but it doesn't really matter since we can't interact with objects in that time warp). Unfortunately, you can't render every 1/2 frame to slow things down, you have to render whole frames.

Again, totally could be wrong about this, but this is how I recall the explanations provided, more or less.

[technicalfool]

Pretty sure that both types of warp work by increasing the dT value. This is why you get extra danger from the Kraken at high physwarp values. The difference between physwarp and non physwarp is in the name: In normal non-phys warp, all objects are packed onto rails. There's no rotation, no collision, it just follows a Kepler orbit.

[Superfluous J]

I personally prefer not being able to pause. If you need to pause you're going too fast. It's not like the guys on Apollo 13 could pause to assess the situation before acting.

[Waterlimon]

I support, simply for the ability to interact with parts while the rocket is not in a stable orbit (because we already have pause, just no interaction)

Clicking on parts while the rocket is spinning and the boosters are wobbling and randomly exploding is difficult.

[LethalDose]

Pretty sure that both types of warp work by increasing the dT value. This is why you get extra danger from the Kraken at high physwarp values. The difference between physwarp and non physwarp is in the name: In normal non-phys warp, all objects are packed onto rails. There's no rotation, no collision, it just follows a Kepler orbit.

Alright, well, agree to disagree then. I'm really pretty certain physics time warp only renders every x'th frame. I know I've read that before (sucks I can't find the source), and it's why the kerbals in the IVA view in the lower right jump around during that time warp. Because of how Unity does physics, the forces and vectors are assumed to be the same through those un-rendered skipped frames as they were in the initial frame prior to the skipping, so I guess you could interpret that to be messing with dT.

And if you believe that it's super easy to add the feature, then you need to come up with a reason that Squad has ignored repeated requests for the feature.

EDIT: I Think one of the previous threads I was looking at was here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/60916-Freeze-frame-Pause-game-without-locking-camera-view

[TKO]

Thanks for the added info Lethaldose. ..I guess it's a shame if it can't be added. I can appreciate the "well, the Apollo astronauts couldn't do this so.." argument, but I was more thinking of it in terms of compensating for a sometimes clumsy user-interface. For example, when I have a four-engine plane that has one of its engines sheer off when 'landing' I imagine a real pilot would be able to hit a swich, or pull a lever to cut the opposite engine before it yaw'ed out of control. Or when I realise I haven't shut-off the flow from the (several) RCS tanks on my rover, I expect the real pilots would be able to hit a few switches to cut the flow.

Instead, I'm having to rotate my view to get those parts into view, right click on them (possibly several times if the right-click is being usually finicky), maybe try again if the rocket/plane is swaying and the part moved out from under the mouse while I was right-clicking .. then I finally hit the toggle to do what I want .. repeat this process for each part. If a total interactive-pause of the game isn't possible, maybe a one quarter or one eighth speed option is -- where I might be able to try to effect the needed change similarly quickly to what the 'real' pilot would, with the necessary button-laden control panel in front of them.

(Suddenly imagining another scenario with a hard moon-landing and one of the four landing engines breaks off .. perhaps what would be ideal is a "panic" button that could be hit, engaging a slow-mo speed for, say, three or four seconds while I frantically get that right-click on the opposite engine so I can kill it. ..could be a nice thing to have. ..feels like bullet-time. ..might be better out of the regular time-scale arrows, and implemented as a big red panic button. ..maybe with the time available dependent on pilot skill/experience? ..okay, I'm rambling now.)