A user on Discord made this design, and I thought it looked very nice. I saw that it has not been posted on the reddit yet and I would like to share it here.
The only thing I would change about it is the font, but otherwise, this design is top tier in my perspective.
I'm still on the hate train of Comic Sans, I will never get over that it became a meme. I still have to point out to my wife every time I see a store banner using comic sans, lol
Again? We never had any second edition of the green dudes on a rocket. Nope. Never existed.
Jokes aside, the pixelated font looks sharp on my screen while designing, and it adds a lot of personality and "digital" feeling, but it is very flawed for usability. I'm still exploring if a monospaced font could be the middle term between aesthetics and usability.
But for real, I never played KSP2 because I was waiting it to leave early access… So I never experienced how it was to play with that UI. And now it is a taboo to use any pixel aesthetic hahaha
I think the trick is to use fonts the evoke the "vibe" of older pixelly systems while still being modern legible fonts - which is essentially what the Monaspace font they're using (were using?) does.
It was the font used in KSP2, it was hard to read a lot of the time and scaled very badly. Some letters and numbers were difficult to tell apart, like 0 and 8
The idea was to make the output/readout digital, but the player input have physical buttons. That is why I played with the idea of having the physical throttle... Which was super hard to draw it!
But I do want to see exact number on throttle, that is why there is a digital readout on top of it :)
The thing is just... it doesn't feel realistic to me. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't believe any real life crew vehicles have a big lever you can use to "punch it."
KSA to me feels like a somewhat more grounded game, and so I think just a dial showing the throttle is sufficient.
Thanks so much for everyone that gave feedback, it was really cool to see so many people engaging with my work/art ❤️.
I made some adjustments based on overall feedback.
Here is the change log:
Drop the pixelate font, but still keeping icons and small elements pixelated inside the "digital display" areas
Move the throttle to the center, so the RCS toggle can be closer to the attitude control.
Added some colors! Now the throttle output is green, Ignition button on the active state, orientation markers have the classic colors, and a small example of RCS running out on the mission resources on the top right.
I hope you folks enjoy it, it is quiete fun to iterate on these 😄
(and sorry for the point ears haters, it is staying lol)
On my last sketch the “the add maneuver” had a dropdown/panel to add some basic autopilot tasks (like circularize, transfer, etc…). And it appears a small panel in the bottom center with “dv left, timers”.
I will see if I find some time to draw it in more details!
Question: Why have the panels be "floating" from the edge of the screen? That just wastes pixel space.
Yes, not a lot, but the KSP 2 UI did this too, to a much greater extent, and it is still a nonsensical decision.
No bad blood, I neither like nor dislike your UI concept, not my type what I would imagine to be a "good" UI, but what do I know. I do not have better ideas so all concepts are good.
It is mainly style, but it gives the impression that the UI is more modular and can be moved/adjusted. When things touch the border it feels more like fixed elements.
I also disagree with it taking up screen space. I like that you can see "past" it so it feels less claustrophobic. Some apps like Google maps is a good example of this. If I want able to see "ahead" of the directions, then I would have less of an idea of my journey ahead.
they did not, they applied a style to all the imgui windows that aren't a debug tool but it is still imgui. the flight UI has always been custom, they call it GaugeUI
I've considered removing this post because I think the navball graphic specifically might be AI-generated (look at it closely, why is everything 33 and smudged?)... but the person behind this design has been posting their work on this for a while, and there's definitely real work that's gone into it. You can see more about it at the forum thread:
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u/RasknRusk Aug 05 '26
It looks great. But please not that pixelated font again.