Control Panel/Terminal and Visual Logic Overhaul (GRID EXPLORER)

Welcome Space Engineer,

Have you ever built a ship too big? Maybe the size itself is not the problem, but more so about keeping an overview when you proceed to create groups and actions to make your creation behave they way you want to. This is for you, a proposal, a vision on how simple Terminal interaction could become.

Picture This, you built yourself a little ship, block by block adding all the functionalities you could ever want, and in you go to the Terminal access only to find that you see everything, not only the ship you are working on, but also every other grid connected to your ship. You and me both hate that so more analytical engineers go in and begin Prefixing your Grids and Subsystems so we can keep an overview about what light fixture belongs to the dinning hall and which door will inevitably vent your ship.

While it is a viable option to go in there and paste your prefixes in all of your 600 components, it is very tedious but totally doable as you may be familiar with here:

It is still quite clattery however so the grouping feature does come in handy sometimes. Right Grouping helps somewhat but you still can't help but notice you can now see the groups of your station and all it's connected ships still, and while you can go in and Prefix these group names still it just doesn't feel great seeing a lot of groups and blocks that you don't care about while you're working on your ship.

This is where the idea of a Hierarchy comes into play, cause really what you want is narrow down to your ship at the end of the day, and instead of figuring out, searching what ship and subcomponent you would like to work in, you always need to clear your search in order to add the newest block you have added. So what I've shown below what it would look like having browsing system inspired from your favorite file explorers navigation panel:

Of course you can still use Block Groups like you would, where Groups work globally on every connected grid, so if you would like to activate self-destruct every ship that has warheads grouped to the same block group name will detonate as per usual. However In this picture I have used Control panels and sub-grids as a sort of folder entity. Here's how they work:

The sub grid folder entity is probably the easiest one to explain because sub gridding type blocks like pistons, rotors, hinges and connectors will 'child' any sub grids in the hierarchy. A big benefit of that is that if you want to disconnect your friends ship, you can find the grid by searching it in the search bar.

The Control Panel folder is a little bit different but will behave the same way that Block Groups Behave. Once you place a control panel on a grid, it is a normal access point that can do everything a control panel block can do, but when selecting an item in the browser like this Air Vent, you might have spotted the new dropdown/search menu under the Block Group section. The selected Control Panel in the dropdown option will become the Air Vent's parent and moves it in the folder of the hierarchy. You can Give parents to multiple blocks at the same time by multiselecting, just like you would use the groups. You can even give a parent to a control panel as well.

- When selecting a control panel that has assigned children you'll be able to perform actions similarly to block groups such as toggling power states of children, showing and hiding from HUD and from terminal, etc. When changing whom you share blocks with, all children will migrate to the setting if you own the blocks.

- Players that access the terminal should only be able to see Items from the Highest level of hierarchy from the connected grid and not its children they don't have access to. Players without authorization should not be able to expand sub grid folders to view it's contents, making a sort of natural firewall for people that intent to gather intel about their raids. Terminals need to be hacked in order to view it's contents.

- If a Parent control panel gets destroyed, children will retain Parent Information in the block settings so that a new control panel can be placed and named. Once the terminal has been named to something a child recognizes they will rearrange into its appropriate spot in the hierarchy. Duplicate control panels can view children when accessed but will not duplicate children in the terminal view but can act as redundancy if the control panels get destroyed.

Ontop of all that, there should be both an expand and retract all button and a view setting for:

- Parent Grids View - Will show Children from the biggest connected grid (By Mass, overrided by station grids)

- Grid Only - Just like the inventory's Grid only view will only show ship grid and it's children(that are not ships)

That's pretty much all I can think of, if you have any questions or additional ideas to this feel free to discuss them below

happy engineering,

Peares S.