A lot of these changes you guys have introduced are great but there’s a one QOL change in particular a lot of us were hoping to get that has instead been made worse and that’s the “Program Duration” slider in the Extraction Program window.
When PI users interact with this window the vast majority of time we spend with it is going to be in setting the duration of the extraction cycle. This slider has 230 “pips” (points at which the slider can be set to) but the entire thing is the same size of the submit button. This slider should not be shrunk to make room for the cycle visualization graph, none of the information in that graph is relevant to PI, it should be the other way around. Setting the correct duration for your cycle is already a huge pain, please don’t make it worse.
The image I linked above shows a more ideal version of the same slider which has been expanded significantly and has little markers underneath it that - when clicked - snap the slider to that specific duration. This would be a humongous QOL improvement which is the whole point of this pass and we would very much appreciate.
You could also improve this interface by making it so numerical keystrokes snap the duration to that # of days. So if I hit ‘2’ when the extraction program window is open the slider snaps to 2 days, then I can adjust it up or down from that point. OR you could significantly reduce the number of pips on the slider. Nobody in history has ever set an 18 hour, 45 minute cycle. I think I speak for everyone when I say it could be 2 hour increments the whole way across for 84 pips instead of 230.
Issue #2: When you two-button-zoom in with the mouse the camera does not narrow in on the point you clicked, it just flails around wildly as it trucks in. Can you imagine if this bug was a feature in Maya or Zbrush? You would stab your eyes out after enduring that for only 6 hours. The old camera was fine, if you can’t fix the new one then you should roll back to the old one before patching in this buggy one.
It would be swell if the camera panned over to one of your launchpads rather than the command center when you go to look at the planet in planet mode. That could compensate for the buggy camera. Any properly designed colony makes no use of the command center and the colony itself has to be moved around the planet over time. If some users’ colonies have no launchpads then their colonies are essentially broken and the camera can rest at 0,0,0 for them for all it matters.
Issue #3: The holograms for the buildings have been made bigger rather than eliminated entirely like we were hoping. I know it sucks to have your art assets go to waste but truthfully we all hate the holograms. They get in the way, they add nothing to the experience. PI isn’t a city building simulator it’s an extension of our spreadsheets and we all interact with it because it pays well. Hey, on that note it would be AWESOME if instead of looking at spherical planets we just looked at a flat plane or an equivalent to the UV map for the sphere. That would be so incredible.
The rest of the suggestions I had for PI before seeing these changes are here in the original thread. This post is just about the stuff that’s been made worse.