Advanced interfaces (Buttons, LCD screens, ect)

Buttons are my favourite block in SE1. There is something so incredibly satisfying about pressing a button in your spaceship and having something actually happen. I have a few suggestions specifically to make the feeling of diegetically controlling your ship even stronger.

First of all, make it so that the LCD screens on functional blocks let you control the block without going into the control panel. Have the default settings for the screen be that it displays the stats and status for the functional block like power usage, name and things like that, and has a bunch of toggles and sliders representing the block's various settings. You would then be able to look at the toggle on the LCD panel for if the block is turned off or on (with the LCD having a separate toggle) and press the interact key to turn it off or on, or to look at a slider, hold f and pull your camera in the right direction to increase or decrease a value. The goal is to make it so that you can diagetically control each functional block rather than having to enter into a menu each time you want to change something. You would still be able to change settings through the control panel, but this would be a more fun option.

Additionally, I think LCD panels should be able to be tied to functional blocks or groups of blocks so that they control that block or blocks in the same ways, so your bridge can actually be filled with screens with various readouts and options that actually mean something and can be used to change the way something works in the game world. If these LCD screens are interactable or not should be a toggleable setting in their own configuration.

Finally, the screens should have adjustable size. Basically, screens are 1x1x1 detail cubes, either flat or at a 45-degree angle or they are a 1x1x2 with a 22.5-degree angle, with selection working the same as with armor blocks. When screens are adjacent to each other and have the same angle, color, and make a rectangle they get treated as a single screen. That way Screens of any size and aspect ratio will be available as part of ship design without cluttering the interface with hundreds of different sizes and aspect ratios.

As for the more tactile side of things, buttons are great already, though I would appreciate flat, 45-degree angle and 22.5-degree buttons( in this case I think it's better to have a 22.5-degree top and 22.5-degree bottom so you can decide if you want a bunch of buttons close to each other on a shallowly angled interface).

But I also think there should be more tactile diegetic controls. I would like to put forwards, the switch, the slider, the keypad, and the joystick.

The switch works a lot like the button by having players look at it and then press interact to use it, but it's used specifically for options that have 2 possible states, and when that state is changed the position of the physical switch also changes to reflect that. It should also have options at all 3 angles.

The slider is on the other hand used for options that have a range of values. It's used by looking at it, holding interact and moving your camera along it before letting go of interact. This can either be a smooth change where the maximum and minimum values are defined in the slider's settings (so for example a rotor might have its minimum set to 0 so you can only make it move one direction and not the other). Alternatively, you could have it be set to have finite increments where you decide how many increments you have (say 2 to 20 increments) and decide what the value of each increment will be exactly. Then using the slider rather than moving instantly, it snaps to even distances along the slider which sets whatever it's controlling to specifically those values. This like the switch should also have values at all 3 angles as well as have the model physically represent whatever the value its setting is, even if that value gets changed through the control panel (if it's set to a value not equal to one of the increments then physically the slider would look to be between whichever increments it's between or at the top or bottom increments).

The keypad would again only work with options that have a range of values, but the way it works is that you type in a whole number and press the enter number button in the corner of the keypad (opposite the clear button) and the value that the pad is assigned to gets set to whatever you typed in. This should also have all 3 angles.

Finally joysticks! Joysticks would work by having you press interact while looking at them. This locks your movement to in front of the joystick. You can still look around at other interfaces and press interact to interact with them as well, with the joystick not needing to do anything while you. But when you press W A S or D (or whatever your walking keys are bound as) then the joystick will activate 1 of 4 actions depending on what you selected. Each action can either be configured like the switch or like the slider.

The end result would potentially be a ship that can be fully diegetically controlled while still having the complexity gained from all of the block settings in the control panel even down to actually flying it, which would be really cool imo.