Restore Vehicle Lighting Controls (new system is...pain)

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I suggest returning the vehicle lighting operation/menu/hotkeys/whatever you wanna call it (via vehicle control) back to how it was. I’m in a recent experimental and the changes to this completely suck. Talk about pointless tedium. WHAT is being gained by this? You used to be able to simply turn on/off your floods, or your aisle lights, or your headlights, and now it’s a multi step popup process that’s a pain in the backside. I see zero upside here. Nothing gained, much lost. The turn off all lights thing isn’t terrible - I suppose maybe handy to turn off head/flood at the same time, but having to select every individual light to turn things on is brutal and if all you want is some aisle lights when you’re parked…just…ug.

If for some reason someone REALLY needs the ability to drill down to controlling individual headlights and flood lights (something I’ve personally never even considered since…why), then add that stuff as an extra dialog option on the previous vehicle control menu, but for the sake of sanity, leave the original simple on/off toggles for lights alone.

There is this trend in the game lately to add extra steps to things that used to be pretty streamlined and a great deal of the time I’m not seeing any benefit (or it’s a situation where the new popup is useful .1% of the time and 99.9% of the time you pick the same option every time) - just a lot of extra key presses to do formerly simple things. I get that there’s depth and I mostly like depth and it’s tough to pull it off in a text-based UI but there has to be a better way than cluttering up and making all the routine stuff so painful. Maybe make TWO activate keys - one to do the normal steamlined action and one to put you into “advanced” mode for when you need something other than the 99.9% default action.

While we’re here, I never did much understand some of the hotkeys for vehicle lights/etc via vehicle control ‘h’ for headlights makes sense. But why ‘v’ for floods instead of ‘f’, and why ‘A’ for aisle instead of just ‘a’ ? Along with ‘g’ for remember this vehicle’s position instead of ‘r’. I don’t think there’s any conflicts on this menu with semi-intuitive keybinds vs pick a random character. Sure, hotkeys don’t HAVE to use a letter that matches a word that’s involved in their function…but it’s really not terrible if that DOES happen. it’d be interesting to know how these were derived. Not the end of the world, for sure, but it’s still something I’ve pondered in the past.

2

It was most likely caused by incremental additions rather than conscious design choices.
The best way would be to allow rebinding them.

As for the rest:
mugling promised to follow up the individual light update quickly, so I OK’d it despite it being rather painful.
My idea of a minimum sane light system was being able to restore light to the last state it was in before it was all turned off. So if you turn off with floodlights and left headlight on, you get an option to turn on floodlights and left headlight on with one button or customize lights with the other.
mugling had some different plans and didn’t want to restore the old system of light toggling for reasons.

I assume the inconveniences are temporary. If they are not and the light system stays painful for a while, I’ll hack around it myself.

3

There might be couple of other similar menu unnecessities. Like the soldering iron. Every time you activate it, you have to choose between ‘repair’ or ‘cauterize’. Not once, in all my time of playing, have I cauterized a wound with it. Repaired an item? A thousand times, and yet we have to suffer the extra menu step.

[SPOILER]
Honestly, I couldn’t be much less interested about the wound cauterization function. In fact, it’s not very well known that it’s a bad idea to close wounds by burning - it sure stops bleeding but infection risk actually goes up. Ask any nurse, or look it up on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauterization Also, yet we can’t heat up knives to perform cauterization, which occurred to me to try on like day 1 and hour 2 of playing the game. The soldering iron cauterization just seems so obscure in the grand scheme.
[/SPOILER]

The worst thing is I’m not sure what to suggest. I do like the option existing, even if I dislike it and never use it, and/but it gets in the way.

Maybe we need a special menu for these rarely used functions. On the other hand, we already have “%”. But then we (or new players) might need to be informed of all the special functions of a said item. List them in the item’s description?

Another example: the tailor’s kit. I’d love to use it as my go-to textile tool, but I’ll use the reinforcement functions only a few times in a game, while clothing repairs can happen hundredfold. But carrying around just the sewing kit doesn’t seem like a perfect solution. So, what if we could instantly craft the tailor’s kit into a sewing kit duplicate called like “tailor’s kit (sewing)”, and upon its activation it functions like the sewing kit, but it’d yet retain the potential to modify clothing, just after crafting it back to the original tailor’s kit. So we’d have like:

Tailor’s kit: Upon activation prompts for sewing or clothes modification (as it behaves now)
Tailor’s kit (modification): Upon activation presents the modification choices. Can’t sew in this mode.
Tailor’s kit (sewing): Upon activation functions exactly like the sewing kit (the menu-be-gone mode)

On the other hand, maybe crafting isn’t necessary, and the tailor’s kit could be harnessed with the power of firearm fire selector. Just like you can cycle between single-fire and burst-fire modes on many guns, you should be able to cycle between sewing and modification modes with the tailor’s kit. Similarily, with the soldering iron, you could cycle between “repair” and “cauterization” modes. (I just had to underline this)

I don’t know what this light shenanigans is about. I haven’t played in at least a month. But it sounds like the interface is taking another turn for the worse. The vehicle controls menu is objectively speaking pretty messy, even if we’ve gotten used to it, grown numb to it over the course of months and years.

Please, for the love of gods, start paying attention to UI usability. Push aside the rarely-used stuff, out of the way, and let the common functions get highlighted first, and sit closer to the top. At some point detail destroys too much usability, and we’ve tapdanced in that minefield a few times now.

4

It’s because a solution to this already exists and the problem is only with people’s awareness of it.
The item action menu, by default bound to ‘%’.

The item action menu will be the answer to all the complaints about tailoring kit having too many actions listed, soldering kit listing 2 actions etc.
The numbers of actions per item will most likely increase in the future and all hacks in the form of “use mode” would get tedious fast.
Item action menu solves it for vast majority of cases and once again: the only real problem with it right now is that it doesn’t have a big red “USE THIS, THIS SOLVES YOUR PROBLEMS” anywhere. Maybe a “tip of the day” system could do that?

5

Honestly, what kind of real car lets you control individual headlights?

6

Well since it’s a completely custom build nine times out of ten in this game I’d say you could do it without too much trouble.