Feedback-PreRelease_20250128

My thoughts on the initial release of SE2 and the perceived gripes so far.

SUMMARY

A promising start to a new building experience, but there is a suspicion that it will drift back to the quality-of-life grievances of SE1 with the same problems but in a new and polished form (Eg. "A good piece of 'tech' but an underwhelming 'game'"). Addressing the core gameplay and the block selection screen is a step in the right direction, but I will remain wary of the UI of the control panels of blocks and also what survival will become. Right now it is the UI and controls which I think will be letting it down for both new and veteran players.

BUGS SO FAR

1. [Major] Collision stops working: After hitting the blue ship with the red one, all impact between other blocks stopped causing damage, even in excess of 50mph (~80km/h) or with tools. Though the debug gun still worked. I was unable to fix this problem and had to resort to a new save.
2. [Minor] Player no-clip after crash: When I finished ramming the red into the blue ship, I found I could now 'no-clip' through every block. Saving and reloading fixed this problem.
3. [Minor] Paint Gun has trouble painting some blocks from certain sides: Inside the red ship, under the large thruster, is one particular spot. When fooling around with this the paint gun sound also stopped working.

WORK-ON POINTS

Controls

1. Lack of tweaks such as mouse sensitivity: These are basic necessities to 3D games nowadays and really should've been provided out of the gate, early access or not.
2. Non-intuitive Copy 'Size' key: When selecting the size block I want, from 0.5m to 2.5m, I found it obnoxious to have to click through all variations of that block, then all the sizes of those variations, before I got to what I wanted. It may be best to split these into groups of either all variations of one size, or all sizes of one variation.
3. CTRL Key Importance: I found out 'CTRL' key accessed a lot of hidden menus by accident (I thought it only did precision movement) so before then I was stuck on how to rotate things until I accidentally pressed my WASD keys.
   
4. Auto-rotate behaves oddly: I dislike it now being a two-button press rather than one-button, and found it to have inconsistencies, where it would often not auto-rotate until I switched surfaces or selected another block.
5. Non-Intuitive Copy/Paste: Took me a while to wrap my head around the controls and I had to watch a video in the end. I was expecting something similar to the building drag and place, where I could select one point at a set size and then drag my mouse across for the area. I was surprised to see only the keyboard option available.

User Interface

1. No Keyboard Helpers: A step back as happened here. It should return to the SE1 interface with having the controls in the UI for the actions the player can do (ie. 'X' for jetpack and 'L' for light, or the assigned key). Bonus points for an option which toggles between 'simplistic' and 'full' interface.
2. Block Control Panel: The preview immediately looks like the list-view of SE1 and I honestly dread that. The button panels, screens and other editable items were horrible to scroll through, so much that when it came to editing them that I avoided this or did as little as I could. I pray the control panel is cleaner/easier to use in SE2.
3. No indication that speed is limited by dampeners: It took some experimentation to realise I couldn't get beyond a set speed unless the dampeners were off.
4. Text Aim Indicator: Could do with a small piece of text at the corner of the screen to indicate what you're aiming at/have highlighted. Now that all the blocks blend and have varying sizes, its hard to know if I am staring at the arse of a thruster, component, or an oddly textured armor block. Literally just a small name tag out of the way is all that it would need.
   

Sound

1. The footstep/jump sound seems a little too strong: When jumping it sounds like a much heavier collision than it appears.
2. Tilting the camera changes sound: When tilting back to look up at the sky it is very audible, but when looking down at the floor it becomes muted (I assume this is to do with the camera/audio receiver placement vs model).
3. Sound remains with player: When mining for example the sound remains in close-proximity despite moving the camera away. May be intentional, but it was different from SE1.

Performance

1. 60-FPS: I'll reserve comments and assume it's a work-on point, but hopefully not a factor enforced by the need to ship to console that remains.
   
2. Stuttering: Breaking apart blocks seems to cause stuttering, especially on the bigger clashes like the red into blue ship. This is improved by turning down the graphics.
   

POSITIVES

User Interface

1. Responsiveness: More 'clicky' sounds and different colours highlighting buttons makes browsing it satisfying.
2. Block Selection: A definite step in the right direction at being easier to navigate and allowing the player to select a block and see more information about it.
   

Gameplay

1. Undo/Redo: Easy to use with common keys, exactly what was needed. It will be interesting to see how it handles parts accidentally disconnected from a station, if that becomes a thing.
   
2. Paint Gun: Time will tell if it is just as good as the mod, but the game was missing something like this and the replace-all is a nice, long-needed touch.

Controls

1. Blueprinting: Excellent that we can now copy parts. I hope it remains this easy in survival, perhaps having the option of being able to place the ghost outline of the projector, as an alternative to clunky UI.