Gravity Generator tooltip for depth needs to be more clear

xPhoenixXx shared this feedback 10 hours ago
Not Enough Votes

The slider marked "depth" in the gravity generator should either be renamed to "horizontal length" (or horizontal depth) or the tool tip that pops up should read "change the size of the front/rear extent of the gravity zone"

Alternately for more precise zone adjustments use the same slider configuration as the "sensor block" uses, which removes any confusion entirely and allows 6 degrees of precision without the ambiguity.


To explain why using the term "depth" might be confusing, consider the following discussion on the usage of this word -


In essense using the term "depth" which on its own without any specific contect generally means how deep down, not how far back, unless you are discussing a specific field such as depth of field used in photography, which is the distance from the observer, in whatever direction they happen to be pointing the camera.


Due to the regional ways different english speakers used the term "depth" ie the US use of it in place of length, without context, and the British use of the term purely in mathmatical geometry in the context of a field, it is not actually obvious that "depth" refers to the front/rear extend of the gravity field. For instance in oxford english the term depth when it is not specifically describing how deep something is, is always used with context, when applied on the horizontal plane, typically when refering to focus or distance from observer, however in the US use of the term they omit any context and instead just randomly use it interchangable with deep/depth/length which makes it highly confusing to non-American style english speaking players (ie the entire rest of the english speaking world) which direction they actually mean.


In general without context, the typical usage of the term "depth" is in the same context as "deep"

For example:

"How deep is the pool, the depth of this pool is 2 metres"


"how deep is this artifical gravity zone, the depth of this zone is 30 metres"

Then why am i floating away? Because in space engineers the slider marked 'depth' is actually used for adjusting the length of the front/rear extent of the gravity zone not how deep it is. oops.


The term is further confused by people for whom english is not their first language, by the proliferation of various US based websites using the shorthand version of the term lacking any context, thus being mistaken for the length from the observer on the horizontal plane, instead of the depth down into the vertical plane which is the gramatically correct application of the term when lacking any other explicit context defining the field it is describing.


Certainly it could be argued this is a perfectly acceptable use of the word, since the US population is larger than the entire oxford english speaking world, as such the majority rules here, which is why my first suggestion above, is simply making the tooltip text a little more specific.

Leave a Comment
 
Attach a file