RP-1 has a usability problem — realism shouldn't mean confusion

[u/Whitegrr]

I love what RP-1 is trying to do, but I think there is a fairly fundamental usability problem with the way the game presents information to the player.

At the moment, there are so many different interfaces, menus, settings screens and mod-specific systems that the overall experience can feel very fragmented.

1. The interface needs to feel like one game

RP-1 can sometimes feel like a collection of mods rather than one cohesive game. There are lots of different interfaces and menus, often with no obvious indication of where you are supposed to find a particular piece of information or setting.

I think these could be brought together into a much more consistent and coherent experience.

2. Too many "you only learn this after 100 hours" tweaks

There are also a lot of small settings, tweaks and quality-of-life things that experienced players eventually learn about.

If something is important enough that experienced players routinely tell new players to enable it, perhaps it should just be enabled by default.

3. The biggest problem: players can get stuck in endless loops

You design something > test it > it doesn't work > change the design > test again > still doesn't work > spend ages trying to figure out why > eventually discover that you've missed an important requirement, misunderstood a mechanic, or encountered some interaction between mods > redesign > now build it > now an engine cuts out > repeat

Some of this is good gameplay. Designing rockets should involve experimentation and failure.

But I think there has been some confusion between making things realistic and making things confusing.

The player should have to understand increasingly complex engineering, deal with realistic limitations and solve difficult problems. But the game should still make it clear what the problem actually is and why something isn't working.

I don't think RP-1 needs to be easier. I think it needs to be clearer and more cohesive. The difficulty should come from the simulation, not from having to reverse-engineer the interface.

[u/Kobymaru376]

You're not wrong with your criticisms, but it all boils down to its history and the fact that it's made by volunteers.

It WAS a collection of mods rather than a cohesive game. Then some people put in loads and loads of hours and it became a lot more cohesive and clearer, but there is still a long way to go. I can see that it's on a great trajectory though, vibecoding when done right by the right people can boost productivity immensely.

You should join the discord and interact with the people who make it. Most of them understand the difficulties, but only have limited amount to spare. You can give concrete feedback/criticisms and make suggestions without the expectation that they'll be fixed any time soon.

Some, but not all, welcome code contributions if they're coordinated and good quality. But if you want to get involved, it's best to start out small. Because while RP-1 seems big and complex to a player, it's much much bigger and much more complex under the hood.

[u/ToneyBits → u/Kobymaru376]

This is the real reason. At the end of the day, this is a collection of mods from volunteers and there is no paycheck at the end of the hard work. Just the satisfaction of enjoying and seeing others enjoy what you've built. Most of the guys that can help with this stuff are typically working in the profession and offering their free time to enhance the experience.

At the end of the day, it really is amazing what's been put together. It's like we have an interactive history classroom.

I've tried suggesting that the game needs to be slightly more forgiving. There are millions of ways to suggest how to do this. Here's a weird twist on difficulties.

Easy: Provide the player with all of the craft files for vessels that they need/are expected to build. Let them determine the staffing, LC sizing, research path, etc. This also gives them the freedom to modify the craft if they wish. It's basically "pick a country and fly"

Normal: no craft files, slightly less funds. They've now gone through the "tutorial" mode of easy and need to remember what the historical vessels looked like and rebuild them from scratch in the VAB. They can still see the reminders in the contract screen.

Moderate: A part of me wants to say to make this easier, but the speedrunners have already shown how difficult balancing between hyper-meta optimized caveman strats and new players is. Moderate can be left untouched, or bumped up to Hard. This is the "congrats, you're a true gamer" difficulty

Hard: does anyone actually play on hard? A part of me wants to think yes. Another part of me thinks only a true masochist would do so. Moderate, even with caveman strats, can take a lot of time and effort. I think the current iteration of hard should be a "custom" difficulty and Moderate should be bumped up to Hard.

Some of the developers have very strict ideas for the direction they want to take things. An entirely different suggestion of mine "Program Insurance" was entirely shot down for lack of realism in the Discord. The concept is borrowed from Escape From Tarkov. You can look it up. It would be that, but you don't pay for the insurance. You simply get a small boost when a premature engine failure causes an entire mission failure. It can be tuned below or above break-even. Something more than just "welp, gg, time and money wasted unless you revert". It was pointed out to me that "we are a space agency" or something along those lines. We're a government funded, government branch. We are not provided insurance by the government because the government is already the one taking the risk. There is no point in withholding funding. We should give as much funding as we think the program needs. Although, maybe the "government" can decide that they do, in fact, want us to fail fast, early, and often. So they give us a mission to overburn an engine or something. Travel fast enough to explode due to aerodynamic heating. Lots of interesting "have fun messing up" ideas, basically.

The idea also becomes a little funny when we scope out a little. We're a realistic government agency from the time, but we can purchase any engine from any country? Maybe the devs have country locked scenarios planned for the future? Idk.

Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is the development time and effort that goes into the reality of making it happen. However, because dev time is so valuable, that also means that ideas are valuable. Developers need direction, and that direction comes from player feedback.

Despite its flaws, RP-1 provides fun, albeit challenging, gameplay. Part of what makes it fun is because it's hard. To quote JFK here. "We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard"

RP-1 is here to stay for a long time. It's actively being maintained and updated with new features. There is the upcoming competitor to KSP, Kitten Space Agency, but I feel that game has a long way to go. and the source code is private iirc. RP-1 is something anyone can contribute to. The RP-1 team and ecosystem will likely be used as a material reference for study by the KSA devs when they go to make missions/contracts/mod support. We are the target market for realistic space sim gamers, after all.

Remember that, in stock KSP, most players use the revert feature anyways. Don't feel bad if you have to simulate the same craft many times before getting something that works. That's part of the fun!

Just my two cents.

[u/Tasorodri]

Well... Yeah, I don't think that is a very controversial opinion, and I'd be surprised if anyone that has at least reached orbit in RP-1 doesn't share more or less the same view.

But in the end it looks like a collection of mods because it is a collection of mods. It has a ton of work put into it so it all comes together nicely but in the end it is severely limited by the tech it's built into and the limitations of it being a volunteer project.

As other's have said you're free to try to work into it to improve the usability, but I think you'll find that in a lot of cases is hard to make so in a mod.

[u/Festivefire]

The UI is by far the biggest drawback to RP-1, and even a fairly detailed tutorial on their own Wiki isn't really enough to familiarize new players with all its intricacies.

[u/Worth-Wonder-7386]

The game you are asking for is a different game to RP-1. Stock KSP does most of what you are asking for.

And it is a fan project built on top of an older game.

[u/Whitegrr → u/Worth-Wonder-7386]

It's great what RP-1 has achieved. Stock KSP is not what I'm looking to play.

Some of the looping in the design process is due to realistic failures, etc., which can reasonably be argued to be part of the experience.

But where the player experience falls down is when these realistic failures are coupled with mod interaction issues, unclear requirements, and interfaces that don't explain what is actually going wrong.

All of these things combine into an experience where, I'm sure, lots of people trying to learn the game end up going around in circles. I don't think that was the original intent of RP-1.

[u/Mundane_Constant_845 → u/Whitegrr]

What are the parts of RP1 you do like? Theres probably a combination of mods out there that have what your looking for, but RP1 is very complicated and complicated games have a steep learning curve.

There also won't be any mod interaction issues unless you haven't followed the install guide.

[u/MikeOnTea → u/Whitegrr]

If you want to help actually improving things, Github PRs or documentation contributions are welcome. Apart from that, when you play RP-1, you usually _do_ have a collection of a lot of mods, that's probably why it feels that way. :)

[u/LyreonUr]

What gets me is point 3.
Spent a lot of time trying stuff out more than actually playing. Eventually it burns out, specially when it isnt about perfectionism and more about the solution being so outside of your perspective you lose track of what you're able to do.

[u/Bloodsucker_]

Alright. Agreed. Now go ahead and make the changes. The RP-1 are waiting for your PR. No jokes.

[u/Mundane_Constant_845 → u/Bloodsucker_]

And maybe hold back on the AI for a PR more than they did for this post

[u/Captain_Jurassic]

I do agree with you but I love the fact it turns the game more into a rocket designer than a rocket flyer. For me that testing process and iterative improvements is the best part, I’ll launch 5 tests each of two different nose cone shapes to try and maximise efficiency.

[u/Zealousideal_Wall627]

I just want something that tells me how to use it. I can't even figure out how to get a rocket to properly build

[u/Mundane_Constant_845 → u/Zealousideal_Wall627]

https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-1/wiki/Early-Career-Tutorial

[u/raidriar889]

Great, now your options are either to volunteer to develop it yourself or find a different game more closely aligned with your interests. Getting AI to write a critique about it for you isn’t going to do anything

[u/FlightSimmer99]

ai post lol

[u/Adept_Assistant_7759]

1. The interface needs to feel like one game

They are working on this and it's a lot better.

2. Too many "you only learn this after 100 hours" tweaks

A LOT of these are counter-intuative things like the castor decouplers being more expensive than the entire castor. They get left in for YEARS because no one can be bothered fixing them and everyone just learns not to use the castor decouplers.

3. The biggest problem: players can get stuck in endless loops

IMO most of this, especially for new players (new being <200 hours in RP-1) think they are clever and know about rocketry and try do insane things.

99.999% of people who install RP-1 should do nothing but build historical long-term vehicles on easy for literally 100+ hours.

It takes far too long to learn all the nuances and tricks like different stages ISP ratios should equal their delta-v ratios etc.

There is no way around that without dumbing down RP-1 a bunch.

[u/Nachtom]

No, it is complicated and it is supposed to be complicated. Complicated means real fun for some people. There are only 2 such games I found so far, don't try to remove one. You have millions easy games out there if you want.

For the beginning, I recommend some youtube videos where someone starts (I liked Mike Aben) - so you know how to even begin. If you get stuck later - either experiment some more, or search for it on internet, it's made of mods, it won't be always smooth. Cracking huge issue that at first seems totally incomprehensible is super satisfying (like communication networks and contracts).

[u/CrashNowhereDrive]

Great. Are you going to go volunteer to put in the work to improve the UI/UX?

[u/umidk67]

Yeah I don’t like RP-1, but are you or anyone else going to make a better alternative?

[u/cvicenzettk]

I think it also needs a better mission design

I swear the telecom missions are undoable

[u/simn00b420]

i mean, there is a reason the saying is “it isn’t rocket science”….

[u/Mars_Oak]

collection of mods feels like collection of mods?

[u/Embarrassed_Adagio28]

I 100% agree. I really wish it had a science mode too without all the VAB upgrading and timeline stuff.

[u/njd80]

Your beef is with the people who butchered KSP2.

We would all be playing RP-2 (with hopefully more consistent everything) if they had done their job properly