Today's update brings a complete overhaul of the game's main UI, and a new "target mode" to help with long-distance planning.
UI refresh
The old UI was basically a big list of lots of values, with no particular emphasis placed on any of them, and generally filling up a lot of the screen. The new UI has been streamlined down to just a few important values, each given appropriate prominence, with related items grouped together.
My hope with this change is that when you need to check something like "what is the camera mode?" or "am I under par?", your eyes will quickly glance at the right place on the screen, rather than having to scan through a list to find what you're looking for.
Other values, like the altitude and velocity readings, have been completely removed. It is my intention that you get an intuitive feeling for manipulating orbital mechanics, which means thinking about the physical size and shape of the trajectory, and not thinking about numbers. In the last update, the tutorials were updated to use visual guides rather than specifying altitude values, so there is no longer any real need to have that information displayed at all.
Changes to the side panel UI:
UI elements are now generally displayed with an icon and tooltip, rather than a word.
Stroke count and par now prominently appear together in a blue circle at the top.
Elapsed time and total power (the other two "scores" for each hole) appear next to the main score. The power you are currently planning to apply to the ball is shown next to total power as a "+" value.
Camera mode and focus are now shown together at the bottom of the screen.
Camera mode redesign: instead of cycling betweeen "auto", "surface" and "orbit", the "C" key now toggles between just "surface" and "orbit" mode. A new "reset camera" button resets back to auto mode, and also resets focus.
"Delta-v" has been renamed to "power" and is now a unitless number. (It was too hard to explain the concept of delta-v and what the unit of "km/s" means, so it can just be an arbitrary representation of the power with which you hit the ball.)
Made an "hour" and a "day" 10X longer (for the purposes of showing times in the UI), so that the Earth actually completes one rotation per day (Earth rotates much slower in the game than in real life). This means there are now 36.5 days in a year, corresponding to the actual number of times the Earth spins on its axis on each orbit around the Sun.
Time scale is now expressed as a simple multiplier of a base scale ("1X", "2X" instead of "2 h 30 m / sec"). On-screen buttons are now available to slow, speed up and pause time.
Goal checkbox now features a '?' button to recall the associated tutorial (it was always possible to do this by pressing F1, but it wasn't easy to learn that).
Hole name is now shown on the pause menu, not in the in-game UI.
Removed ball situation (e.g. "in orbit"), altitude, apoapsis, periapsis and velocity numbers.
Changes to the in-world and trajectory UI:
The "T -" countdown time to the planned shot is now shown on the trajectory line, rather than in the side panel UI.
The orange arrow indicating the planned shot angle and power has been replaced with a wedge of concentric blue arcs.
Events related to the ball's current body no longer show the body name (e.g. "Apoapsis" instead of "Moon apoapsis").
Other UI changes:
Added a new blue theme for dialog boxes and interface elements.
Main menu redesign: large orange menu items rather than simple buttons.
Reduced the very thick drop shadows on all text to a more subtle effect.
Replaced the default font with a new one that fits the tone of the game a bit better.
Target mode
The other major change is that the "alt" time preview feature introduced in Hole 8 has been replaced with a new "target mode". From Hole 8 onwards, you can now right-click on a body to set it as the "target". The game now automatically shows the point on the ball's trajectory where it will be closest to the target, and where the target will be at that time. This makes it significantly easier to plan journeys to distant bodies like Mars. (The old alt mode still works, but may be removed in a future update.)
Other changes
Updates to the tutorials:
Following on from the previous update, Holes 6–9 have been updated to use the new tutorial system (separate dialogue, full-screen pop-ups, and goals with no detailed explanation).
Added four new tutorials for Holes 6 and 8.
Hole 8: Replaced the tutorial on time preview mode with one for target mode.
Hole 2: Added a tutorial for fine adjustment (Shift).
Pause/time controls are now disabled for first two levels.
Planning a shot in the future is now disabled until Hole 6.
Bugfixes:
Fixed time moving (very slowly) while "paused" at the start of each level.
Fixed Phobos and Deimos future "ghosts" not appearing in time previews.
Fixed a possible crash when using time previews across different trajectory segments.
Hole 3: Fixed time slowing down throughout the level whenever you approach the apoapsis if you skipped over the "pause" goal.
Minor changes:
Updated Godot from 4.6.1 to 4.6.2. Steam SDK from 1.63 to 1.64. GodotSteam wrapper from 4.17.1 to 4.18.
Increased the eccentricity threshold for an orbit to be considered "circular" (where the apoapsis and periapsis disappear).
Hole 3: Increased the threshold for completing the "close to apoapsis" requirement.
Hole 9: reduced par from 5 to 4 (this has gotten easier now with better tools).
Offscreen flag indicator: fade in and out rather than snapping.
Free Play level: Moved tee from Earth to Moon.
Changed UI scaling so the UI elements remain large in a 16:10 aspect ratio (this keeps the text above the minimum requirement for Steam Deck verification).